David M. Richardson

Dave Richardson is former Director of the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology and is currently Professor of Ecology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. His research focuses largely on plant invasions. He is author/co-author of more than 550 journal papers and book chapters, has edited seven books, including Fifty years of invasion ecology (Wiley-Blackwell; 2011), Plant invasions: The role of biotic interactions (CABI; 2020), Wattles: Australian Acacia species around the world (CABI; 2023), and is co-author of Invasion Dynamics (Oxford University Press; 2017) and Invading Ecological Networks (Cambridge University Press; 2022). He was Editor-in-Chief of the journal Diversity and Distributions between 1998 and 2015. He 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, in 2019 the Kwame Nkrumah Award for Scientific Excellence from the African Union, and in 2025 the South African Association of Botanist's Gold Medal.