People have moved species to regions outside their natural distribution for centuries. A small proportion of these species become invasive and have detrimental effects on native biodiversity, ecosystems and human well-being. India’s ecosystems are currently threatened by multiple invasive species yet action is often thwarted by inadequate or untimely information. The Mapping Invasive Alien Plants (MIAP) initiative is an open-access platform to collate, analyse and synthesise invasive alien plant data from citizen scientists into actionable outputs for stakeholders.