Monitoring non‐native plant richness is important for biodiversity conservation and scientific research. The species‐area model (SA model) has been used frequently to estimate the total species richness within a region. However, the conventional SA model may not provide robust estimations of non‐native plant richness because the ecological processes associated with the accumulation of exotic and native plants may differ. Because roads strongly dictate the distributions of exotic plants, we propose a species‐accumulation model along roads (SR model), rather than an SA model, to estimate the non‐native plant richness within a region. Using 270 simulated data sets, we compared the differences in performance between the SR and SA models. A decision tree based on prediction accuracy was created to guide model application, which was validated using field data from 3 national nature reserves in 3 different provinces in China. The SR model significantly outperformed the SA model when non‐native species were restricted to the roadsides and the proportion of uncommon exotic species was small. More importantly, the SR model accurately estimated the non‐native plant richness in all field sites with an error of <1 species per site. We believe our new model meets the practical need to efficiently and robustly estimate non‐native plant richness, which may facilitate effective biodiversity conservations and promote research on non‐native plant invasion and vegetation dynamics.
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