The Caatinga never went missing: a reply to Zappi et al. (2025)

We clarify fundamental misunderstandings of our review on invasive species in tropical dry forests (TDFs). Contrary to Zappi et al.'s assertion, our review includes papers from the Caatinga TDF system. We provide an updated map that demonstrates (1) the dramatic inconsistencies in how TDF systems are defined, and (2) the locations of articles in Brazil included in our review. We further clarify that our review was not intended to provide a comprehensive list of all invasive species found in TDF, but rather to assess the current state of scientific research on the ecological impacts and management of invasive species in TDF. Our list of species is therefore certain to be incomplete, which we highlight as one of the findings in our review. We believe the lack of scientific publications on TDF invasives and the bias toward a small handful of species and geographies is an important finding to guide future research. Finally, we argue that the word limits for review papers may contribute to this type of misreading, as readers may not always look at the Supporting Information where specifics on methods and the full list of papers are located.