During the last two centuries, thousands of insect species have been transported (largely inadvertently) and established outside of their native ranges worldwide, some with catastrophic ecological and economic impacts. Global variation in numbers of invading species depends on geographic variation in propagule pressure and heterogeneity of environmental resistance to invasions. Elton's diversity-invasibility hypothesis, proposed over sixty years ago, has been widely explored for plants but little is known on how biodiversity affects insect invasions. Here we use species inventories from 44 land areas, ranging from small oceanic islands to entire continents in various world regions, to show that numbers of established insect species are primarily driven by diversity of plants, with both native and non-native plant species richness being the strongest predictor of insect invasions. We find that at large spatial scales, plant diversity directly explains variation in non-native insect species richness among world regions, while geographic factors such as land area, climate and insularity largely affect insect invasions indirectly via their effects on local plant richness.

Centre for Invasion Biology Department of Botany and Zoology Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch South Africa

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences Praha 6 Suchdol CZ 165 21 Czech Republic

Department of Ecology Faculty of Science Charles University Viničná 7 CZ 12844 Prague 2 Czech Republic

Division of Informatics and Inventory Institute for Agro Environmental Sciences NARO Ibaraki Japan

INRA UR0633 Zoologie Forestière 45075 Orléans France

School of Biological Sciences Monash University Victoria 3800 Australia

Scion Christchurch 8540 New Zealand

The Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany CZ 25243 Průhonice Czech Republic

US Forest Service Northern Research Station Morgantown WV 26505 USA

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