Losing any species of animal or plant could have a far more lasting impact on our environment then many people think. A new paper in Nature takes a look at nature’s complex systems, and how our ecosystem can probably absorb a few extinctions here and there. What trees and plants are they facilitating, and what would their extinction mean in the grand scheme of things? What’s true for ants and plants, might not be true for cats and rats, you see. Using swathes of statistical data, Barabási & Co crunch down all the parameters and components of any complex system into a single crucial number.