This multi-authored book aims to show how an understanding of ecological processes can be used for invasive plant management in semi-arid ecosystems. Despite this apparent focus on semi-arid wild lands, the ecological principles outlined by the authors are broadly applicable. Indeed, the book elaborates on how invasiveness of species can be explained by plant traits like dispersal, establishment and response to disturbance, how the environment, and management of the environment, affects invasive plants and how invasive plants in turn affect their environment – mainly the soil conditions – to benefit their own performance. Successfulness of strategies to reduce this performance, argue many of the authors in principle, increases when all these characteristics, processes and mechanisms that render plants invasive, or an ecosystem susceptible to invasive species, are considered. The authors provide guidelines for such successful management strategies as well as for restoration – through revegetation – of ecosystems that are affected by an invasive species. The book is divided in two parts – ‘assessing ecosystem processes and invasive plant impacts’ and ‘principles and practices to influence ecosystem change’ – each composed of five sparsely illustrated and densely but clearly written scientific chapters that could be read independently. Coherence could have benefited from a general introductory and a concluding chapter, highlighting and linking the most important points. With this book, the editors nevertheless delivered a valuable contribution to the existing literature on this topic that could serve a range of professionals and students with a broad interest in plant ecology and ecosystem management.