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We report the challenges associated with the recent establishment of a community science program to monitor rare plants in the geographically diverse southern Illinois, USA region.

Over the first 3 years, our program has been successful in the collection of over 250 monitoring records for rare species through the recruitment of a group of passionate volunteers. However, our volunteers are predominantly middle‐income, college educated, white females who are not representative of the population at large of the region. We propose a recruitment strategy to broaden the diversity of our volunteers by better engaging community members who are not typically involved with plant monitoring but are interested in hiking, walking in natural areas, gardening, and restoration activities, and others who would like the opportunity to collaborate with scientists and researchers in addressing an environmental issue.

Practical implication: Community science plant monitoring programs face challenges in recruitment, retention, remoteness of field sites and data quality. Addressing these challenges through targeted recruitment strategies aimed at reducing structural and cultural barriers to participation, along with frequent program assessment, is necessary to enhance the success of these programs.

This review focuses on reciprocal transplant gardens to detect local adaptation, especially in grassland species beginning with early seminal studies of grass ecotypes. Fast forward more than half a century, reciprocal gardens have moved into the genomic era, in which the genetic underpinnings of ecotypic variation can now be uncovered. Opportunities to combine genomic and reciprocal garden approaches offer great potential to shed light on genetic and environmental control of phenotypic variation. Our decadal study of adaptation in a dominant grass across the precipitation gradient of the US Great Plains combined genomic approaches and realistic community settings to shed light on controls over phenotype.

Common gardens are not without limitations and challenges. A survey of recent studies indicated the modal study uses a tree species, three source sites and one growing site, focuses on one species growing in a monoculture, lasts 3 years, and does not use other experimental manipulations and rarely employs population genetic tools. Reciprocal transplant gardens are even more uncommon, accounting for only 39% of the studies in the literature survey with the rest occurring at a single common site. Reciprocal transplant gardens offer powerful windows into local adaptation when (a) placed across wide environmental gradients to encompass the species’ range; (b) conducted across timespans adequate for detecting responses; (c) employing selection studies among competing ecotypes in community settings and (d) combined with measurements of form and function which ultimately determine success in home and away environments.

Synthesis. Reciprocal transplant gardens have been one of the foundations in evolutionary biology for the study of adaptation for the last century, and even longer in Europe. Moving forward, reciprocal gardens of foundational non‐model species, combined with genomic analyses and incorporation of biotic factors, have the potential to further revolutionize evolutionary biology. These field experiments will help to predict and model response to climate change and inform restoration practices.

We quantified intraspecific variation in four functional traits of 26 subordinate species in an experimental grassland established with two population sources (i.e. cultivars and local ecotypes) of three dominant grasses (Sorghastrum nutans, Andropogon gerardiiandSchizachyrium scoparium) and three pools of subordinate species (each from one origin) within each of the dominant grass source treatments.

Twenty of the 26 subordinate species exhibited intraspecific trait variability for one trait or more in response to dominant species population source, and variation among population sources of the dominant species was non‐random. Dominant grass population source affected intraspecific variability in functional traits of multiple subordinate species. Cultivar sources of the dominant grasses and some of the subordinate species that established with them had higher and generally more variable functional leaf area and leaf nitrogen content compared to local ecotypes of the dominant grasses and the subordinate species that established with them. Local ecotype sources of the dominant grasses increased leaf area based functional diversity of subordinate species.

Synthesis.This study provides evidence that intraspecific trait variability in dominant species acts as a biotic filter to constrain niche availability and dimensionality affecting trait variation of subordinate species during community assembly.

We compiled data from 16 multi‐year experiments located at a single native tallgrass prairie site. These experiments included responses to 11 anthropogenic environmental changes, as well as non‐random biodiversity loss either the removal of uncommon/rare plant species or the most common (dominant) species.

As predicted by the mass ratio hypothesis, loss of a dominant species had large impacts on productivity that were comparable to other anthropogenic drivers. In contrast, the loss of uncommon/rare species had small effects on productivity despite having the largest effects on species richness.

The anthropogenic drivers that had the largest effects on productivity nitrogen, irrigation, and fire experienced not only loss of species but also significant changes in the abundance and identity of dominant species.

Synthesis. These results suggest that mass ratio effects, rather than species loss per se, are an important determinant of ecosystem function with environmental change.