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The Central Great Plains are a prairie ecoregion of the central United States, part of North American Great Plains. The region runs from west-central Texas through west-central Oklahoma, central Kansas, and south-central Nebraska. It is designated as the Central and Southern Mixed Grasslands ecoregion by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
The ecology of the Great Plains is diverse, largely owing to their great size. Differences in rainfall, elevation, and latitude create a variety of habitats including short grass, mixed grass, and tall-grass prairies, and riparian ecosystems. [1] The Great Plains extend from Mexico in the south through the central United States to central ...
Ecological processes on a large-scale level such as climate, fire and grazing have strong influences in this system. Today, the shortgrass prairie has suffered the greatest biological destruction of any major biome in North America. The three central processes historically shaping the shortgrass prairie are herbivory, drought, and fire.
Flowering big bluestem, a characteristic tallgrass prairie plant. The tallgrass prairie is an ecosystem native to central North America.Historically, natural and anthropogenic fire, as well as grazing by large mammals (primarily bison) provided periodic disturbances to these ecosystems, limiting the encroachment of trees, recycling soil nutrients, and facilitating seed dispersal and germination.
The eastern and central sections of the region are drained by tributaries of the Loup River and the Niobrara River, while the western section is largely composed of small interior drainage basins. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) designated the Sandhills as an ecoregion, distinct from other grasslands of the Great Plains. According to their ...
Like the High Plains farther north, it is extraordinarily smooth. [9] It is very dry, except for occasional shallow and temporary water sheets after rains. Llano is separated from the plains on the north by the mature consequent valley of the Canadian River, and from the mountains on the west by the broad and probably mature valley of the Pecos ...
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Rainfall here is 39 inches (1,000 mm) per year, higher than most of the Great Plains. The Northern tall grasslands lie to the north and have fewer and different species of grass, while the Flint Hills tall grasslands to the south have a rockier landscape. [2]