Plant species assemblages, communities or regional floras might be termed ‘saturated’ when additional immigrant species are unsuccessful at establishing due to competitive exclusion or other inter‐specific interactions, or when the immigration of species is off‐set by extirpation of species. This is clearly not the case for state, regional or national floras in the USA where colonization (i.e. invasion by exotic species) excee...

We evaluated long‐term trends in average maximum and minimum temperatures, threshold temperatures, and growing season in eastern Colorado, USA, to explore the potential shortcomings of many climate‐change studies that either: (1) generalize regional patterns from single stations, single seasons, or a few parameters over short duration from averaging dissimilar stations; or (2) generalize an average regional pattern from coarse...