In the June issue of Ecology Letters, Smith and Knapp show that with a more realistic extinction scenario, in which rare and uncommon plant species were removed but the most common or dominant species were always present, no decline in aboveground plant growth of a native Kansas grassland community was observed.
Instead, the dominant species imparted resistance to ecosystem change, even in the face of a 3-fold decline in species. The loss of uncommon species did negatively affect the remaining rare species, however, which portends additional loss of these at-risk species and eventual erosion of ecosystem function.
Ecology Letters