Thousands of insect species have been introduced outside of their native ranges, and some of them strongly impact ecosystems and human societies. Because a large fraction of insects feed on or are associated with plants, nonnative plants provide habitat and resources for invading insects, thereby facilitating their establishment. Furthermore, plant imports represent one of the main pathways for accidental nonnative insect introductions. Here, we tested the hypothesis that plant invasions precede and promote insect invasions. We found that geographical variation in current nonnative insect flows was best explained by nonnative plant flows dating back to 1900 rather than by more recent plant flows. Interestingly, nonnative plant flows were a better predictor of insect invasions than potentially confounding socioeconomic variables. Based on the observed time lag between plant and insect invasions, we estimated that the global insect invasion debt consists of 3,442 region-level introductions, representing a potential increase of 35% of insect invasions. This debt was most important in the Afrotropics, the Neotropics, and Indomalaya, where we expect a 10 to 20-fold increase in discoveries of new nonnative insect species. Overall, our results highlight the strong link between plant and insect invasions and show that limiting the spread of nonnative plants might be key to preventing future invasions of both plants and insects.

Department of Ecology and Evolution University of Lausanne 1015 Lausanne Switzerland

Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague 16500 Prague Czech Republic

Forest Industries Research Centre University of the Sunshine Coast Buderim QLD 4556 Australia

Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique UR 0633 Zoologie Forestière 4575 Orléans France

Intertidal Agency San Francisco CA 94104 5401

Northern Research Station Forest Service US Department of Agriculture Morgantown WV 26505

Research Center for Agricultural Information Technology National Agriculture and Food Research Organization 305 8517 Tsukuba Japan

Scion Christchurch 8440 New Zealand

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Global proliferation of nonnative plants is a major driver of insect invasions

Historical plant introductions predict current insect invasions