Grasslands

Learn why grasslands are threatened and why it is important to protect and restore them. Temperate grasslands include the prairies of North America, the steppes of Eurasia, and the Pampas of South America. Tropical grasslands include the savannahs of Africa, northern Australia, and the Cerrado of southern Brazil. All types are characterized by abundant grass species, carbon-rich soil, and diverse wildlife, including many types of birds. Grasslands provide multiple ecosystem services, including food for livestock, water infiltration, pollination sources, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration, as well as recreational uses. Although grasslands have existed for millions of years, human activities have recently degraded them (see Desertification Nexus). Threats to grasslands and their wildlife include:

• Conversion to crop agriculture, in which simplified farming systems replace the diverse, complex ecology of natural pastureland, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Additionally, the implementation of industrial agricultural practices, such as tilling, monocropping, and the use of toxic chemicals, deplete soil fertility, reduce plant and animal diversity, create erosion, and release stored carbon from the soil.
• Land fragmentation as a result of urban encroachment, road construction, housing subdivisions, and the erection of fences damage the integrity of grasslands.
• Invasive plant species can outcompete native species in grasslands.
• Overgrazing livestock can reduce the vitality of grasslands, reduce species diversity, and cause erosion (see Regenerative Agriculture Nexus).
• Disruption of natural fire cycles on which grasslands depend for renewal can have adverse ecological impacts (see Fire Ecology Nexus).
• Illegal hunting of wild herbivores, such as elephants and rhinoceros, and the killing of lions and other predators can disturb the ecological balance.
• Trade and sale of bushmeat (from wildlife) and the illegal trade in animal parts, such as ivory, harm wildlife populations and impact grasslands.
• Prolonged drought amplified by global warming can transform grasslands into deserts as rainfall patterns change and water becomes scarce.
• Soil erosion can be caused by roads, vehicles, and development.
• Overharvesting water resources and inefficient irrigation methods can deplete lakes, rivers, and water holes.
• Inappropriate tree planting can damage grassland ecosystems.
• Unmanaged recreation, especially the use of off-road vehicles, can degrade grasslands.
• War and other types of conflict can be major disruptors of grassland ecosystems, as this story from Ethiopia explains.

Volunteer with local conservation groups. Many grasslands and savannahs around the world have local or regional groups that work to protect and restore them and offer a wide variety of activities. You can help remove invasive weeds, grow, and plant a native species to assist pollinators, take part in a wildlife survey, or participate in restoration work (see Degraded Land Restoration Nexus).

• A resource guide to organizations conducting conservation work on native prairies in the U.S. Midwest, includes Prairies Forever, the Missouri Prairie Foundation, the Tallgrass Prairie Center, and the Coastal Prairie Conservancy in Texas.
• Wildflower restoration is a focus of many conservation projects, including this one in the UK. You can grow wildflowers at home, or start a wildflower meadow near where you live (after choosing a site carefully), or participate in a community garden or restoration project.
• Many hunting organizations conduct habitat conservation work as well as purchase threatened grasslands for permanent protection, such as Pheasants Forever, Ducks Unlimited, Quail Forever, and the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,
• If you live near a grassland, become a birder—there are many resources for identifying grassland-dependent birds and raptors, including annual surveys that involve volunteers.
• Grow and plant native species where you live to support birds and pollinators. Here is a database maintained by the Audubon Society.
• A report from the Audubon Society on the state of grasslands in North America and how citizens can get involved.
• Here and here are volunteer conservation opportunities in Africa. Global Volunteers has projects in grassland regions.
• Many international and regional groups have opportunities for people who live on or near a grassland or savannah to participate in volunteer work (see list of Organizations below).

Get involved with wildlife issues connected to grasslands. In addition to the endangerment of their habitat, many species of wildlife are in jeopardy as a result of human activities, including poaching, illegal hunting, bushmeat markets, and the spread of chemicals and pollution. The rate of loss is accelerating. Understanding the threats and then taking action at home or abroad can assist animals in peril.

• Learn which African grassland species are being poached, and avoid purchasing medicines or products that contain animal parts acquired from poaching, such as ivory. Be aware of efforts to hold corporations and social media sites accountable for their role in facilitating the trade of banned products.
• Support projects that protect and restore endangered grassland species, including shutting down tiger farms, protecting rhinos in South Africa, reseeding native plants, and the scientific monitoring of cheetahs.
• Find crowdfunding and online platforms that allow you to support conservation work financially, or locate volunteer opportunities, such as GVI, Giving Compass, Global Giving, or learn how to start a fundraiser.
• Join a social media site that is focused on grasslands conservation and wild animal protection, such as Africa People & Wildlife, African Wildlife Conservation News, Birdlife International, Southeastern Grasslands in the US, the Grass Fed Meat Association of South Africa, or sites like the Google.org-funded Wildlife Crime Technology Project, which tests innovative technologies.

Participate in ecotourism and travel to destinations on or near grasslands and savannahs. Ecotourism takes visitors to natural environments with the goal of supporting local conservation efforts, observing wildlife, and supporting a green economy. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, ecotourism was thriving in many places around the world, including the tropical grasslands of Africa. The financial hardship caused by the pandemic to conservation efforts has been severe. Efforts are underway by ecotourism companies to reestablish their operations with projections for robust future growth. Here are some examples:

• Ecotourism on grasslands in Namibia.
• African safari companies are offering a variety of experiences, including participation in research, antipoaching patrols, wildlife population counts, and rhino conservation activities.
• Great Plains Ecotourism Coalition (U.S.)
• Green Safaris in Zambia
• Great Plains Conservation (Botswana)
• Here is a list of ecotourism/safari opportunities.
• Here are ecotourism opportunities in South America.
• Stone Horse provides ecotourism trips to Mongolia.
• Ecotourism in Uzbekistan and Armenia.
• Earth Changers provides a variety of ecotourism trips.

Become a Master Naturalist with an emphasis on grassland and savannah ecology and restoration. Here is a list of Master Naturalist programs by state in the U.S. Here is a Master Class on Savannah Restoration offered in Texas.

Buy products that support the protection, management, and restoration of grasslands. Farmers and ranchers, often in partnership with conservation organizations, have implemented marketing campaigns that promote their regenerative agricultural practices, many linked to grasslands. Purchasing these products supports the farm or ranch and encourages others to adopt similar conservation programs on their land. Examples include:

• Bird-friendly beef, such as Audubon’s Conservation Ranching Program, Blue Nest Beef, and American Farmland Trust’s Sustainable Grazing Project.
• Here is a buying guide from the Audubon Society.
• Grass-fed, organic, and regenerative food products, such as Panorama Meats, Farm Foods Market, Crowd Cow; grassland beef from US Wellness Meats; exotic meats from Fossil Farms, Silver Fern Farms (NZ), Verde Farms (Uruguay), Finca Sarbil (Spain), Bloomplaats (South Africa).
• Eat Wild has directory of farms and ranches in the U.S. and Canada that produce and sell grass-fed meat, dairy, and other products.

Support organizations that actively protect grasslands and wildlife and work on their protection and restoration by making a donation or joining the organization. Conservation organizations need financial support to carry out their missions, and a donation allows groups to continue their work. BirdLife International works with local groups and landowners to restore and protect grasslands in South America and other locations around the world, improving the state of the world’s birds. Other possibilities can be found on the Organizations list below.

Protect native grasslands and savannahs from loss and fragmentation. A significant amount of grasslands around the world have been lost, degraded, or are no longer intact due to human activities, especially the conversion from pasture to crop agriculture. Every effort needs to be made to stem further loss. In the northern Great Plains, over 130 million acres of grasslands remain intact, 70 percent of which is privately owned. In Africa, the conversion of savannahs to farming is pushed by banks and governments as rural economic development. Instead, public, private, and community owners of grasslands should:

• Refuse to convert grasslands to crop agriculture, especially if it involves plowing or other forms of soil disturbance.
• Sell or gift your land to a conservation organization, agency, or community trust in order to protect it from development.
• Place your grassland under a conservation easement that prohibits development, or put it in a government conservation reserve program.
• Band together with other landowners and livestock producers to fend off subdivisions and other land conversions, such as the South Rift Association of Land Owners in Kenya, and the Western Landowners Alliance in the U.S.
• Work with a conservation group to create new business opportunities and markets for grassland-related products. The World Wildlife Fund has a Sustainable Ranching Initiative that works collaboratively with landowners in the northern Great Plains.
• Join a community-based conservation effort, such as those piloted by the African Conservation Centre in Kenya, this one in Mongolia, this one in New Jersey, this one in the Flint Hills of Kansas, and this one in Argentina, focused on jaguars, a result of partnerships between conservationists, landowners, scientists, financial institutions, and agencies.
• The Climate Action Reserve has developed a Grassland Protocol to provide guidance to landowners and others on how to quantify, monitor, report, and verify greenhouse emission reductions associated with avoiding the conversion of grassland to cropland.
• Here is a guide from the USDA on conservation practices that protect grasslands.
• Consider enrolling your land in a Grassland Conservation Reserve Program.

Improve livestock grazing practices. Grasslands and savannahs are home to large herds of native herbivores, such as bison, which have evolved their grazing behavior over millennia. Mimicking the “graze-and-go” behavior of native herbivores with domesticated livestock supports the biological health of these ecosystems, improves water cycling, reduces erosion, and can increase the amount of carbon that can be sequestered and stored in grassland soils (see Regenerative Agriculture Nexus).

• Control the timing, intensity, and frequency of livestock impact through short-duration rotational grazing. Methods include holistic planned grazing, mob grazing, adaptive high stock density grazing, and adaptive multi-paddock grazing. Learn about multispecies grazing and its various benefits to the land (see Animal Integration Nexus).
• Use a herder to control livestock. Pastoralist communities, such as the Maasai in East Africa, the Fulani in West Africa, the Navajo in the American Southwest, and yak herders on the Tibetan Plateau, have employed herders for centuries. Herders are used in the French Alps to control sheep, in Idaho, in Spain, and for llamas in the Andes. For cattle, a low-stress method for moving animals has been developed (see Pastoralism Nexus).

Conduct controlled burning of your grassland. Ecologically, many grasslands and savannahs are adapted to dry-season fires, which remove dead and dry plants, stimulating new growth and cycling essential nutrients back into the soil in the form of ash. Periodic burning can also remove invasive species that are not adapted to fire. Fire can be used to restore degraded grasslands. Letting natural fires (such as lightning-ignited ones) burn is often not practical, so most burning is conducted in a controlled manner. There are options for landowners who wish to do a controlled burn, including working with conservation organizations, such as the Nature Conservancy, that have experience in the field. Ranchers can collaborate on implementing fires, such as a group in the Flint Hills of Nebraska. Controlled fire is a tradition of Indigenous knowledge in many regions. Here is a resource guide to grassland burning (see Fire Ecology Nexus).

Employ conservation technology to monitor wildlife and help improve connectivity between different parcels of land. Land fragmentation and climate change pose challenges to the ability of plants and animals to adapt to changing conditions, particularly along established wildlife migration corridors. Technology, including camera traps, drone surveys, DNA analysis, and data tools, can help wildlife avoid poaching and mitigate conflicts with livestock (see Wildlife Corridors Nexus).

• The Wildlabs.net project collects, analyses, and shares data collaboratively with landowners, NGOs, and agencies.
• Inventory and monitor your prairie, grassland, or savannah. Work with researchers to catalog. One example is the Grassland Vegetation Inventory in Alberta, Canada.

Restore degraded grasslands. Soil erosion, overgrazing by livestock, invasive and noxious species, extended drought, and extreme weather events are sources of grassland and savannah land degradation (see Desertification Nexus). Practices that heal degraded areas include controlled burning, improved livestock grazing, seeding native plants species, as well as riparian and stream restoration strategies that can repair damaged water cycles and stop soil erosion (see Degraded Land Restoration Nexus and Rewilding Nexus).

• Restoring Your Degraded Grassland to Conservation Prairie is a guide for landowners.
• Guides to prairie restoration in Minnesota.
• How to climate-proof prairies.
• A guide to the restoration of annual grasslands in California.
• Savannah restoration in Brazil’s Cerrado.
• A research article on restoring Russian steppe grasslands.

Plant prairie strips as a low-cost conservation practice with multiple benefits. In the U.S., a prairie strip is a narrow band of vegetation placed on a farm to act as a sponge for water moving downhill, buffering the soil against erosion and reducing the amount of fertilizer that enters waterways. Prairie strips are seeded with a mixture of native grasses and other perennial prairie plants. The captured sediment improves soil health, which boosts plant growth, sending roots deeper into the soil and enabling additional carbon to be sequestered underground. Prairie strips increase the number of grassland bird species and enlarge populations of beneficial insects, butterflies, bees, and other pollinators.

• Prairie strips were developed by researchers at Iowa State University. The university published an introduction to prairie strips and a FAQ guide.
• The Soil and Water Conservation Society has a resource guide to prairie strips.

Remove the destruction of grasslands and savannahs and their wildlife from your supply chain. The conversion of grasslands to soy and corn production continues around the world, especially parts of the Amazon Basin and Brazil’s Cerrado savannahs (see Regenerative Agriculture Nexus). Corporations can protect these ecosystems from further loss by refusing to buy agricultural products from companies that destroy grasslands.

• Conversion-free beef is gaining momentum among companies that are concerned about the climate change consequences of converting grasslands to soy production.
• Here is a proposal by the World Wildlife Fund on how Argentina can lead the market on conversion-free beef.
• Here is an article on conversion-free efforts globally.

Use onsets to achieve carbon emission reduction goals focused on credible land protection and restoration projects that improve soil carbon in grasslands and savannahs. Onsets are carbon credits that create a net reduction in greenhouse gases. Organizations such as Gold Standard and ClimeCo provide verified onsets via their financial support of projects that improve carbon levels in the soil through regenerative agriculture and reforestation. For more information, see Onsets Nexus.

• The Land Trust Alliance developed a pilot project with the goal of permanently protecting grasslands through the use of carbon credits.
• Here is a Grassland Protocol prepared by the Climate Action Reserve on the carbon credit potential of avoiding grasslands conversion in the U.S. and an example from a ranch in Colorado.
• Here is a scientific analysis detailing the climate benefits of avoiding grassland conversion and the potential for carbon credits.
• The Working Lands Investment Partners brings together private capital and landowners to ensure payments for practices that protect grasslands and sequester carbon in their soils.

Make a donation and/or partner with a conservation organization to protect and restore grasslands, savannahs, and their wildlife. Apple Inc. is partnering with Conservation International to restore degraded grasslands in the Chyulu Hills of Kenya in order to sequester carbon dioxide in soils, protect a wildlife corridor for elephants, and support local Maasai cattle herders (see Pastoralism Nexus).

Support ecotourism companies and other economic development projects as opportunities for private investment. In Mozambique, a private investment firm has worked to restore and fund a wildlife reserve with private capital using a business model that sees financial returns from ecotourism. Care, however, must be taken to honor local economic and cultural concerns. Other efforts are being explored to move beyond ecotourism to achieve conservation goals using private funding, including pilot projects being developed by the African Leadership University in South Africa.

The Grasslands Biome - Biomes #5 by Geodiode (11 mins.)

Ecosystems Episode 3: The Grassland Ecosystem by The Wild Report (6 mins.)

Grasslands as Carbon Sinks by Electrify Now (69 mins.)

America’s Grasslands: a Threatened National Treasure by Prarie Public (26 mins.)

Rangeland health restoration initiative for “One World – One Health” by Global Landscapes Forum - GLF (105 mins.

Restoring Grasslands in South Africa | Global Ideas by DW News (8 mins.)

How Bison Are Saving America’s Lost Prairie by PBS Terra (8 mins.)

Saving Wildlife & Grasslands: East Africa's Maasai on nature preservation | Pioneers for Our Planet by the World Economic Forum (5 mins.)

Examples of Grassland Restoration - Excerpt from Talk by Allan Savory at Tufts University by Steven Noble (13 mins.)

Grasslands, Outside Beyond the Lens by PBS (27 mins.)

The Plight of the Grassland Birds by PBS (57 mins.)

The Value of Grasslands | Nature Works Everywhere by PBS (6 mins.)

Plains | Earth a New Wild by PBS (54 mins.)

Wyoming Grasslands | Wyoming Chronicle by PBS (28 mins.)

Land Degradation by MDCI Kenya (20 mins.)

Land Degradation Neutrality. Why it Matters, How it's Done. by UNCCD (15 mins.)

IPBES Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment - English Subtitles by IPBES Secretariat (7 mins.)

Land Restoration for Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by the International Resource Panel (3 mins.)

Habitat Restoration Fundamentals by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (79 mins.)

Dynamics of Global Grassland and Savannah Biomes by Hannah Victoria Herrero and Jane Southworth / Mdpi AG

Special Report on Climate Change and Land by the IPCC

UN Millennial Ecosystem Assessment Reports

Land Restoration for Achieving Sustainable Developments Goals by the United Nations Environment Programme

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, With a New Preface (2nd ed.) by David Montgomery / University of California Press

Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health​​​​​​​ by Jo Robinson / Little, Brown Spark

Goodreads List of Books about Grasslands (Fiction/Non-Fiction)

Goodreads List of Books on Plains, Savannahs, Praries, and Grasslands (Fiction/Non-Fiction)

"Soil Erosion 101" by Keith Mulvihill / NRDC

Center for Grassland Studies Podcast by the University of Nebraska

The Best Biome Podcast by Grassland Groupies

Native Plant Podcasts on Grasslands 

Grassland 2.0 Podcasts