Today it is far more than a garden plant. Its effect on dry forests of Madhya Pradesh was examined in a study published in 2025 in a Frontiers in Forests and Global Change study , based on fieldwork done in 2017 and 2018. The shrub, which threatens 44% of India’s forest cover, covers over 13 million hectares.
A pretty garden plant sounds like an unlikely forest villain. But that is exactly what lantana was in India: an ornamental shrub.
What the study cannot prove and what may help
Carbon results were inconsistent. The authors warn that a decline in the number of young trees growing back will probably disrupt how the forest stores carbon in the long run. The authors are honest about what their work cannot show. The study was a field comparison study. They also ask for long-term monitoring to see how these forests change over time. There are some ideas for lantana control, though none has worked at scale. Some attempts have been made to use the shrub, including in compost and basket-making. The PLOS ONE authors suggest we may need methods to manage lantana over time, not just attempt to wipe it out. This story shows how a plant brought in for decoration can end up becoming a long-term headache for forests.
The Frontiers team studied tropical dry deciduous forests that make up 40.9% of India’s forest cover, according to the India State of Forest Report 2019. Their fieldwork took place in 2017 and 2018 at three forest sites in Sagar, Madhya Pradesh. They compared sites with less than 50% lantana ground cover to sites with no lantana cover. They made 60 plots in all, 30 in each group. In total, 98 plant species were found at lantana sites, compared with 132 at sites without lantana. The total forest carbon was 142.4 metric tons per hectare in the lantana areas, while in non-lantana areas it was 153.7 metric tons per hectare. The top 50 centimeters of soil in the lantana areas averaged 73.1 metric tons of carbon per hectare, compared with 65.2 in the others. To reduce this risk, the team chose plots without lantana that were 50 to 100 meters from invaded plots and in similar conditions.
In Punjab, chemical control followed by planting fast-growing native species yielded positive results, says the Frontiers paper. It also says fire can help spread lantana even more.
That means the lantana sites might have been low in species and carbon even before the shrub arrived.
