Addressing the Ecology and Management of <i>Prosopis</i> Species in Eastern Africa

Abstract

Prosopis trees have intentionally been introduced to eastern Africa to provide a suite of benefits. The trees have subsequently become invasive, resulting in detrimental impacts on ecosystems and people’s livelihoods. Their management is therefore complex, with no apparent simple solutions being available. Addressing this will require integrated interdisciplinary research approaches involving ecologists, economists and social scientists, as well as close collaboration with the potential end-users of research findings. This book describes how these problems were addressed in a 8-year research initiative, the Woody Weeds project, and a three-year implementation project, the Woody Weeds + project, which sought to integrate findings from different disciplines to scale these up to appropriate spatial resolutions, and to involve potential end-users at all stages. This chapter outlines the intention of the book to draw together scattered studies into a single, open-access volume that should be useful to researchers and managers alike.