colonization-based saturation for birds is further corroborated by patterns of invasion in Hawaii, where birds introduced earlier were more likely to become established and persist than those introduced later, when naturalized richness was higher (Gamarra et al., 2007). For groups like plants, which have had few extinctions and many introductions, islands were presumably not saturated by colonization-based mechanisms before species introductions. If, however, oceanic islands have now reached a colonization-based saturation point for plants, then the probability of introduced plant species becoming naturalized on islands should have decreased over the past 200 years as more and more of these species became naturalized. One way this could manifest is as an asymptote in the cumulative number of exotic plant species that became naturalized over time.

We evaluate the possibility that plants have reached a colonization-based saturation point on oceanic islands by examining time series of exotic species additions to individual islands through time (see Methods). A complete list of analyzed islands and their naturalized richness values through time are described in the Appendix. Our results show no evidence of an asymptote in number of plant species that have become naturalized through time on any of the islands analyzed, which we illustrate with patterns of naturalization on six individual islands (Fig. 5.3). Instead, the number of naturalized plant species has increased in an approximately linear manner over time, with some potential evidence for exponential increases in a few cases (Fig. 5.3). Also in a few cases, and most notably for Heron Island, there appears to be a slight leveling-off in the number of naturalized species for the very last date recorded; this leveling-off is due to a procedural artifact in how naturalizations are tallied. Because exotic species that are recorded for the first time are typically not classified as being naturalized (because there is no evidence yet that they have established self-perpetuating populations), the total number of naturalized species will generally be underestimated in the last time step (see Methods).

In addition to change within individual islands, we also analyzed patterns of change across islands. To do this, we constructed 20-year bins as points of comparison through time (see Methods). Currently, the average ratio across islands of naturalized-to-native plant species is ≈1:1. Our results show that this ratio has changed fairly steadily through time, from 1860 to 2000, with no evidence for an asymptote in the rate of change (Table 5.1). Only the final time step shows a leveling-off, but this is due to a procedural artifact (see Methods). A second way to illustrate change across islands is with comparisons of regressions through time between the log number of native and naturalized species. To do this, we used the same 20-year bins. Our results show that the slope of these log-log relationships has been fairly consistent through time, which we illustrate with all of the statistically significant regression lines for 20-year bins (Fig. 5.4A). Nonsig-