David M. Richardson

David M. Richardson was Director of the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology in South Africa between 2011 and 2022. He is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Botany and Zoology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His research focuses on biological invasions, mainly plant invasions. Dave is author or co-author of over 500 journal papers and book chapters and several books, including Invasion Dynamics (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Invading Ecological Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2022). He has edited or co-edited nine books, including Ecology and Biogeography of Pinus (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Fifty Years of Invasion Ecology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), Biological Invasions in South Africa (Springer, 2022) and Plant Invasions: The Role of Biotic Interactions (CABI, 2022). He was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Diversity and Distributions between 1998 and 2015. Dave was awarded the Hans Sigrist Prize for 2006 by the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 2012 received the John F.W. Herschel Medal, the senior medal of the Royal Society of South Africa, and in 2019 was recipient of the African Union's Kwame Nkrumah Award for Scientific Excellence (Continental). Most of his work on this book was done while he was on sabbatical leave with support from the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Czech Republic.