(NEW YORK) — America has lost about half of one of its most prominent and iconic landscapes, and protecting what’s left is key to ensuring healthy ecosystems and biodiversity in the future, experts told ABC News.
The continental U.S. has lost about half of its historic grasslands prior to European settlement, according to a press release from America’s Grasslands Coalition, a network of conservation organizations, researchers and government agencies that aims to restore North America’s native prairie and grassland ecosystems. An estimated 98% of native tall grass prairies has been eradicated, Ryan Sensenig, a grassland ecologist at the University of Notre Dame, told ABC News.
While grasslands are typically associated with the Great Plains, they used to exist in nearly every region of the U.S., Dwayne Estes, co-founder and executive director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute told ABC News.
Grasslands were common everywhere from the Atlantic coastlines to the Mississippi River and into the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast, according to experts. Regions that are not typically associated with grasslands, including New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, were covered in them, Estes said.
They are part of the very fabric of North America’s natural heritage, “from sea to shining sea,” Patrick Keyser, director of Tennessee’s Center for Native Grasslands, told ABC News.
Grasslands continue to be threatened, experts say
Today, grasslands continue to disappear at an “alarming rate,” the coalition said.
Invasive plant species have infiltrated many of the natural grasslands, said David Wedin, director of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Grassland Studies. And most recently, development of housing, shopping malls and interstate highways — and now data centers — are popping up in areas that would have been grasslands, Keyser said.
Currently, grasslands cover about 1 million square miles in the continental U.S., according to America’s Grasslands Coalition. This includes savannahs and shrublands.
The most prominent pockets of native grasslands that still exist today are in the Flint Hills of Kansas, which contains about 4.5 million acres of grasslands, and the Nebraska Sandhills, which has about 12 million acres of grasslands.
The area of Nebraska is still an intact grassland. Much of the land is privately owned cattle ranches, but there is still a lot of native grassland and species left there, Wedin said.
Central Montana also contains scattered patches of native grasslands, Keyser said.
There are more than 1,000 native grasses that have been documented in the U.S. The two species of dominant native grasslands in the U.S. include the big bluestem, a robust grass that can grow to 10 feet tall and make for “excellent” cattle forage, and the little blue stem, a much smaller plant that is common on sandier, drier soils, Keyser said.
When US grasslands began to vanish
Indigenous communities relied on grasslands to survive, Sensenig said. They would practice prescribed burning to maintain the grasslands and enhance its biodiversity, Sensenig said. Native Americans would use the plant species for basket-weaving and currency and feed on the grazers, such as bison, elk and deer, Sensenig added.
“Eastern Massachusetts was historically dominated by grasslands before European settlement, and in that area people used to eat these things called prairie chickens regularly,” Keyser said, adding that prairie chickens require extensive grassland for their habitat.
Other evidence of grasslands on the East Coast includes thousands of insect and plant species that are tied to grasslands that still exist in the region, Estes said.
Grasslands east of the Mississippi River have been gone for “a very long time,” Estes said.
As early as the 1690s, grasslands began to disappear from places like Philadelphia and Baltimore, even before the nation was founded, Estes said.
In the 1700s and 1800s, pioneers began to clear land where there were fewer trees to create their farms. They tended to prioritize semi-open areas, Keyser said.
“Eastern grasslands were lost so long ago that basically they’ve been erased from society’s collective memory,” Estes said. “They were lost before the camera was invented.”
Grasslands continued to be eradicated as settlers migrated West.
The Transcontinental Railroad later brought settlers into the Great Plains in the 1870s, and gasoline-powered tractors led to widespread plowing of the native grasslands in the region, Keyser said.
“So, consequently, what had been a grassland ecosystem became a cornfield,” Keyser said.
Why grasslands are so important
Grasslands play a vital role in supporting wildlife, storing carbon, sustaining food systems and maintaining ecosystem balance, according to America’s Grasslands Coalition.
Grasslands also store huge amounts of carbon, which helps to regulate the atmosphere, Sensenig said. It is important for soil conservation, water regulation and wildlife habitat, Wedin said.
Grasslands are thought to store 30% of the world’s soil-based carbon — and 80% of that carbon is beneath the ground in the soil, Sensenig said.
Keystone herbivore species such as the American bison, elk and mule deer live in grasslands and help to regulate the rich plant biota for other creatures to thrive, Keyser said. Birds, pollinators and smaller mammals, such as prairie dogs, also depend on the open, grassy ecosystem and assist in maintaining the biodiversity, Estes said.
Grassland ecologists are concerned about the gradual degradation of grasslands due to lack of management and climate change and other changes to the environment, such as intensive modern agriculture, Wedin said.
“These sorts of chronic, low-level threats have a cumulative impact on our grasslands,” Wedin said.
Nearly half of 2,014 Americans surveyed are unfamiliar with grasslands, according to findings released Wednesday by America’s Grasslands Coalition.
Increasing appreciation and awareness of America’s grasslands is key to accelerating conservation action, according to the coalition.
The upcoming 250th birthday of America is an integral time to raise awareness of the importance of grasslands, Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement.
“As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, this is a moment to recognize the landscapes that have shaped the nation,” Hemley said. “From iconic species like bison to the communities that depend on them, grasslands are part of that heritage — and protecting them is part of our shared future.”
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