The status of biological invasions and their management in South Africa [DRAFT FOR PUBLIC COMMENT]

Note to reader

We are inviting you to submit comments, corrections, and queries on this fourth status report on biological invasions. We have prepared a standard form for commenting that you can fill in if you wish, but if you would prefer to send in your inputs in your own format, please indicate the page and line numbers to which your comment refers. Many of the technical details (and data on which the report is based like the list of alien species) are available in the appendices and supplementary material (links available on the last page). Please also consider commenting on these. If you are in a position to provide additional information, we would be very grateful. We will aim to ensure all contributors are appropriately acknowledged. If you do not wish to be named, please let us know. We would like as many people and organisations to make inputs as possible, so please send on. We will capture all comments received during this commenting period and track how they are responded to. A database of these comments and the responses will be available on request once the report has been released.

Comments to be sent to: IAS.report.SANBI@gmail.com By: 1 March 2026

Form for comments: https://tinyurl.com/h7fxmu6u

We are also very keen to find how we can make the report more useful for you and your organisation. As such we would also be very grateful is you completed a questionnaire (should take 10 to 15 minutes) available at: https://tinyurl.com/ycymbd3v also by 1 March 2026

This is a draft report. The report is based on information up to the end of December 2025, while much of this has been included there are still some analyses to be completed. Therefore, the results are demonstrative of what the final report will look like rather than necessarily indicative of the current state as it will be presented in the final report. Specific sections where work is on-going are flagged either with a note in square brackets or in a footnote to the text.

Thank you in advance for your comments, we appreciate you taking the time to engage with us.

Yours sincerely,
 Dr Tsungai Zengeya
(on behalf of the fourth status report drafting team)

The previous status reports are available to download at http://iasreport.sanbi.org.za; and https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7414803, links for on-line resources are available at end of this report.

The South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) are thanked for funding noting that this publication does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of DFFE or its employees