Attack on the East——the status and management of biological invasions in China

Decades after ecologist realized the negative effects of species alien to local floras and faunas, and started investigating the effects of them, particularly those that cause invasions, governments started accepting the importance of this issue and biological invasions became a well-known environmental problem. In spite of this, not many countries have so far made a detailed assessment of their alien invasive species. The United Kingdom, USA, and other developed countries are in the lead but their economically less developed counterparts are lagging behind. Thus, it is surprising that whilst a freshly published report on the invasive alien species of South Africa was highlighted on the pages of Nature (Wild,2018), the extensive two- volume book on the invasive species of China, published by Springer in 2017, gained less attention.