Over the past two decades, modeling the ecological impacts of harvesting wild plants, as source of food and medicine, has used stationary population growth rate as the metric to measure effects of harvest. In this talk, I show that using asymptotic rather than the transient growth rates may underestimate the effect of harvest and of other disturbances. The transient growth rate and its variation between population-level harvest intensities (high versus low) were smaller than their asymptotic equivalent. Patterns of elasticity of transient growth rates to perturbation of vital rates were different from those of the asymptotic elasticity. Asymptotic growth rates were more elastic to perturbation of late life stages; however, transient growth rates were more elastic to early life perturbations. These results suggest that the more than fifty published studies on the effects of harvest on wild plant population dynamics using only asymptotic growth rates may have been underestimating such effects in the short-term.