Restoring one of the world’s premier grassland ecosystems
Photo: Alan Mark
The Central Grasslands
The prairie grasslands of North America are found in the central and western interior of the continent, and include what are commonly referred to as the mixed grass and short grass prairie. Together, they are known as the Central Grasslands which extend in a relatively continuous swath through the heart of the continent covering almost 6 million square kilometres and extending longitudinally for about 1,500 kilometres from southern Canada to northern Mexico. These grasslands once rivalled the renowned Serengeti Plains of Africa for their diversity and abundance of wildlife with populations of a wide variety of grassland birds, bison, elk, pronghorn antelope and deer and their predators, numbering in the tens of millions.
Spanning the boundary between Canada and the United States at the northern end of the Central Grasslands, the Northern Great Plains Ecoregion encompasses an area of approximately 225,000 square kilometres.
