Species invasions have contributed to the extinction of many species worldwide (Clavero and Garcia-Berthou, 2005), particularly on islands (Sax et al., 2002; Steadman, 2006). These extinctions have occurred disproportionately among taxonomic groups. For example, birds have lost many species, both in absolute terms and relative to their total number of species, whereas plants have lost few species (James, 1995; Sax et al., 2002; Blackburn et al., 2004). The lack of recorded extinctions in plants does not appear to be due to a lack of knowledge, particularly on well-studied islands like New Zealand, where both historic and fossil records suggest that few native plant species have been lost (Sax et al., 2002). Why so few plant species have been lost is somewhat of a mystery, particularly considering the thousands of exotic plant species that have been introduced to islands (Sax et al., 2002). This near-lack of plant extinctions to date raises the obvious question of whether this trend will continue. In particular, should we expect few additional plant species to go extinct—even on individual islands where hundreds or thousands of exotic plant species have invaded? Should ongoing and future invasions eventually lead to mass extinction events among island plant taxa?

Our ability to accurately forecast future extinction events is limited by shortcomings in current ecological and evolutionary theory. In particular, we have a relatively poor understanding of the processes that ultimately limit how many species can inhabit any given place or area. One important concept, however, that arises from several prominent theories of species diversity is that for any given set of environmental conditions there is a “saturation point” that bounds the number of species a place or region can support (MacArthur and Wilson, 1963, 1967; Hubbell, 2001; Tilman, 2004). There are two basic ways that a saturation point for species richness could operate. First, the total number of species present in an area could be maintained as a balance between extinction and colonization. At the saturation point, the addition of new colonizing species results in the local extinction of a like number of previously established species. We refer to this as “extinction-based saturation,” which is consistent with Island Biogeography Theory (IBT) (MacArthur and Wilson, 1963, 1967). Second, the total number of species in a place could be maintained by suppression of colonization. A saturation point is reached if the invasion of new species is inhibited by species already present. We refer to this as “colonization-based saturation,” which is consistent with the resistance to invasion in