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The shortgrass prairie is an ecosystem located in the Great Plains of North America.The two most dominant grasses in the shortgrass prairie are blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) and buffalograss (Bouteloua dactyloides), the two less dominant grasses in the prairie are greasegrass (Tridens flavus) and sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula).
The Northern Shortgrass Prairies have a semi-arid climate, with annual average precipitation ranging from 270mm to 450mm. [citation needed] Winters here are cold, with a mean winter temperature of −10 °C (14 °F), but chinook winds, most common in the western part of the region, closest to the Rocky Mountains, ameliorate the cold temporarily when they pass over.
Semi-arid steppe grassland (shortgrass prairie) is the most common vegetation, covering 79 percent of the Grassland (including the adjacent Rita Blanca National Grassland). Ten percent of the land is covered with Pinyon – Juniper woodland, almost entirely in the western sector.
Prairie ecosystems in the United States and Canada are divided into the easternmost tallgrass prairie, the westernmost shortgrass prairie, and the central mixed-grass prairie. Tallgrass prairies receive over 30 inches of rainfall per year, whereas shortgrass prairies are much more arid, receiving only 12 inches or so, and mixed-grass prairies ...
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The tallgrass prairie, with moderate rainfall and rich soils, were ideally suited to agriculture so it became a productive grain-growing region. The tallgrass prairie ecosystem covered some 170 million acres (690,000 km 2) of North America. Besides agriculture, much of the shortgrass prairie became grazing land for domestic livestock.
The habitat type is known as prairie in North America, pampas in South America, veld in Southern Africa and steppe in Asia. Generally speaking, these regions are devoid of trees, except for riparian or gallery forests associated with streams and rivers. [1] Steppes/shortgrass prairies are short grasslands that occur in semi-arid climates.
This ecoregion largely corresponds with the geographical region known as the High Plains.It is located in southeastern Wyoming, western Nebraska (the Nebraska Panhandle), eastern Colorado, western Kansas, western Oklahoma (the Oklahoma Panhandle), eastern New Mexico, the Texas Panhandle and parts of west-central Texas and a very small portion of southwestern South Dakota.