Many Names, Many Kinds

Grasslands have many names around the world. North American grasslands, home to famous animals like the American bison and the prairie chicken, are called prairies or plains. They are also called either tall-grass or short-grass prairies depending on the type of grass that grows there.

This grassland in Wales is called a moor. Click for more detail.

South African grasslands are known as velds, while South America has pampas and llanos. In Europe and Asia, grasslands are called steppes, although in Hungary, they call them puszta. Grasslands that occur in the middle of forests are often called meadows.

Why do we bother using so many names? Aren't grasslands the same everywhere? In fact, they're not. Depending on where they are, grasslands can be very different. They get different amounts of rainfall. Some are so dry they're called desert grasslands, while others are flooded all or part of the year. Many are flat, but some occur on mountainsides.

They also have very different species of plants and animals. Some grasslands in Nepal have grass species that reach up to 6 meters tall – almost twenty feet – while some United States grasslands have grasses less than a foot tall. You won't find a rhinoceros and a black-footed ferret in the same place, even though they're both grassland animals. Rhinoceroses live in velds, while black-footed ferrets are prairie animals.

The brown color on the map above marks the areas across the world where grasslands are the main biome type. Click for more detail.

The grassland biome is widespread around the world, and it's found at a wider range of latitudes (our north-to-south measure of the earth) than many other biomes, such as rainforests, deserts or tundra.

Grasslands are found on every continent, except Antarctica. They aren't found in the arctic either, where the climate is simply too extreme for grasses to thrive.

Depending on where grasslands are found, they can be either tropical, which means they stay about the same temperature year round, or temperate, which means they have hot summers and cold winters.

Forest and grassland often border each other. If the offspring of these trees spread into the grass and survive, then this whole area might become forest. If the trees die out, however, the grass will rapidly take over. Image by Patrick Mackie.

If you look at a continent where both the forest and desert biomes are found, you'll often find that grasslands lie in between them. Not only that, but some of those deserts and forests were once, long ago, grasslands. Areas where trees started to sprout on the grassland became forest. Areas where grass died out became desert.