Herbarium records provide comprehensive information on plant distribution, offering opportunities to construct invasion curves of introduced species, estimate their rates and patterns of expansions in novel ranges, as well as identifying lag times and hence “sleeper weeds”, if any. Lag times especially have rarely been determined for many introduced species, including weeds in the State of Queensland, Australia as the trait is thought to be unpredictable and cannot be screened for. Using herbarium records (1850–2010), we generated various invasiveness indices, and developed simple invasion and standardised proportion curves of changes in distribution with time for ~ 100 established and emerging weed species of Queensland. Four major periods (decades) of increased weed spread (spikes) were identified: 1850s, 1900–1920, 1950–1960 and 2000–2010, especially for grasses and trees/shrubs. Many weeds with spikes in spread periods did so only 1–2 decadal times, except for a few species with higher spike frequencies > 6; the majority of these spikes occurred recently (1950–1990). A significant proportion (~ 60%) of Queensland’s weeds exhibit non-linear increase in spread with time, and hence have lag phases (mean: 45.9 years; range: 12–126 years); of these lag-phase species, 39% are “sleeper” weeds with > 50 years of lag time (mainly trees/shrubs and grasses). Twelve traits of invasiveness, including lag time and species-specific/historical factors were screened, of which frequency of invasion waves, spread rates and residence time were the main drivers of weeds’ distribution. The low predictive power of lag time on weed distribution suggests that retrospective analyses offer little hope for a robust generalisation to identify weeds of tomorrow.

植物标本馆记录提供了关于植物分布的全面信息，提供了构建引入物种入侵曲线的机会，估计它们在新范围内的扩张速度和模式，以及确定滞后时间，从而确定“沉睡杂草”（如果有的话）。许多引进物种的滞后时间尤其很少被确定，包括澳大利亚昆士兰州的杂草，因为该特性被认为是不可预测的，无法进行筛选。使用植物标本馆记录（1850-2010 年），我们生成了各种入侵指数，并为昆士兰州约 100 种已建立和新出现的杂草物种制定了简单入侵和标准化的分布随时间变化的比例曲线。确定了杂草蔓延（峰值）增加的四个主要时期（几十年）：1850 年代、1900-1920、1950-1960 和 2000-2010，特别是对于草和树木/灌木。许多杂草在蔓延期间有尖峰，但只有 1-2 次十年，除了少数具有更高尖峰频率 > 6 的物种；大多数这些峰值发生在最近（1950-1990 年）。昆士兰州的大部分杂草（约 60%）随着时间的推移表现出非线性增长，因此具有滞后期（平均：45.9 年；范围：12-126 年）；在这些滞后期物种中，39% 是滞后时间超过 50 年的“沉睡”杂草（主要是树木/灌木和草）。筛选了12个入侵性状，包括滞后时间和物种特异性/历史因素，其中入侵波的频率、传播率和停留时间是杂草分布的主要驱动因素。