Areas of the world covered by grasslands.
Vast area's of the Earth's surface is covered by grasslands. Of the fifteen major crops that stand between us and starvation, ten are grasses. Grains which are the seeds of grasses are a very important food source. Grains we eat include, Wheat, Rye, Sorghum, Corn, Rice, Oats, and Millet. Grasslands are found on every continent except Antarctica, and they make up most of Africa and Asia. There are several types of grasslands; prairies, plains and savannas.
Areas of the world covered by grasslands.
Grasses are immensely important, and a short walk outside your door will lead to an encounter with grasses. Misconceptions about grasses is common. People will say, 'they have no flowers', 'they all look alike', 'they have no color'. All untrue. Grasses have flowers they are just very tiny, grasses come in many colors, and grasses vary in appearance from corn, to lawn grass.
Identifying grasses is not easy and grasses have special words to describe their plant parts. Two other large groups of plants resemble grasses and are often confused. These are rushes and sedges. Grasses have mostly hollow stems and sedges and rushes have mostly solid stems that are often triangular. Sedge stems also have no joints like grass stems.
Sedge stem on the left and jointed grass stem on the right.
Grasses are very important ecologically and economically. They move around the earth easily with man, and many of the grasses we find in North America are from some other country and arrived since European settlement.
Grasslands develop where there isn't enough rain for forests but too much rain for deserts. Grasses can withstand, fire, drought and other tough climate conditions. Most plants growth tissue is at the very tip of the plant. If this top bud is eaten or destroyed the plant sometimes has a hard time growing (although sometimes it sends out some side branches). Grasses growth tissue is located toward the base of the plant. This means that if it gets cropped, burned or grazed it can grow back from the base. A lot of the grass plant grows beneath the ground and the roots can form dense mats Sometimes as much as ninety percent of the total living weight of the grass is the roots. The roots have high concentrations of starch and energy so they are able to withstand a destruction of the plant and grow back the green shoots. Grasses live in areas that are usually dry so the roots help hold moisture.
Indians would often set fires to the prairie to encourage new growth. Some of these prairie fires would be immense.
Some cultures live on grasslands. One of the most famous is the Mongolian Nomads of Asia. Pictured below is a Mongolian child riding a pony.
When American settlers reached the prairie of Illinois they were amazed. Extraordinary meadows stretched for as far as the eye could see. The reason there are no trees in the short grass prairie is there is not enough rain. Trees are much larger and need a lot more water than a grass. About ten to fifteen inches a year fall on the great plains and this not enough for tree growth.
When people speak of the prairie they are mostly referring to the tall grass prairie. The word prairie is from the French word for meadow because the area was discovered by the French explorers Marquette and Joilet in 1673. The tall grass prairie has some of the most fertile soils on the earth, and today is where most of the corn is grown and is known as the corn belt. The native grasses in the tall grass prairie grow taller than a person and the soil is black from the accumulation of centuries worth of rotted grass roots. Unfortunately only one percent of the tall grass prairie exists anymore. It's former range being taken over for the production of corn, soybeans, factories and houses.
A man wrote in 1824, "I do not know of anything that struck me more forcibly than the sensation of solitude I experienced crossing this, and some of the other large prairies. I was perfectly alone, and could see nothing in any direction except sky and grass."
In 1880's the cattle industry was booming, and people thought the grasslands would feed people forever. The cattle ranchers pushed the land too far and exceeded it's carrying capacity. If there are too many animals, they will graze the grasses to far, leaving them without enough growth tissue to re-grow. Also, they compact the soil and trample grasses. If cows eat all the good grass and leave the plants they don't like, eventually the plants they don't eat take over. This had happened to countless acres in the Midwest and great plains. The grazing capacity of the Great Plains is half of what it used to be.
A word on cows:
Cows can digest cellulose and turn leaves and grass into protein, something
us humans cannot do. The keeping of cows on grasslands made sense because it
allowed otherwise unusable land that was too dry to grow good crops to still
produce human food. Most of the tall grass prairie is planted for corn and soybeans
to feed to the cows on the massive feedlots.
Feedlot
We could eat the corn and soybeans ourselves and have a much more efficient use of the nutrients in the plants. To raise protein in a vegetable form and then feed it to the cattle results not in more protein for us but in less. We could live upon a diet of combined grains and beans and fulfill all our protein needs. Animals and cows especially are inefficient energy converters. In fact for every 21lbs of protein consumed by a cow only one pound is converted to energy. The rest is excreted in the form of manure and usually ends up washing into the water source and overloading the water with nitrogen. A beef oriented diet is hard on the land and very inefficient and wasteful.
Grasses are one of natures small wonders that we often overlook (in fact we step on it most of the time). Understanding how small parts of nature can have such important purposes helps us to understand and appreciate how amazing nature's design is.
Links To Grassland Information
World Resources Institute grasslands information
Grasslands information from National Wildlife Federation
Grasslands description from eNature.com