The impacts of invasive alien plant species on native plants are generally well documented, but little is known about the mechanisms underlying their impacts on crop growth. A better understanding of immediate as well as legacy effects and of direct and indirect impacts of invasive alien plant...

Sustainable land management (SLM) practices are key for achieving land degradation neutrality, but their continued implementation lag behind the progression of various forms of land degradation. While many scholars have assessed the drivers of SLM uptake for restoring land affected by...

This paper presents the results of studies conducted to compare local stakeholders' perceptions of the effects of Prosopis juliflora invasions in Afar (Ethiopia) and Baringo (Kenya) with detailed ecological data. Focusing on biodiversity and water availability, factors affecting local households...

Invasive non-native plants (INNP) cause severe impacts on nature and human well-being, and these are predicted to increase. While management tools have been developed to control early-stage invasions or to clean particular sites from INNP, they are only rarely available to halt and reduce...

Herbivorous insects play important roles in agriculture as pests or as weed biological control agents. Predicting the timing of herbivore insect population development can thus be of paramount importance for agricultural planning and sustainable land management. Numerical simulation models driven...

Augmentative biological control offers a potentially effective, but largely unexplored, opportunity to control native weeds with native phytophagous insects. Herbivore effects on the target weed may further be enhanced by interspecific competition with other plant species. We assessed the impact of ...

In weed biocontrol, the release of multiple candidates has been proposed as a way to increase herbivore load and thus impact on the target weed. However, the use of multiple herbivorous species may reduce overall herbivore load due to interspecific interactions. We assessed whether a combined...

The context-depency of biological invasions makes it difficult to understand why some species become succesfull invaders and others not. Such understanding requires studying closely-related invasive and non-invasive alien taxa sharing the same introduction history in the same environment. We...

This chapter documents the biological control efforts (targeted at arthropods, weeds and microorganisms) in the Eurasian region, highlighting a number of cases of successes and failures. It is indicated that despite a long history of importation biological control, the regulatory framework of the...