Grass. If there is one plant that has come to dominate our world, it’s this. Occupying every biome on earth except the icesheets, grasses have colonised every patch of soil, from tropical to temperate forests, savannah to steppe, scrubland to desert. Humans have taken these grasses and shaped them over generations into crops that feed the world today. Their homelands are the seas of grass we call Meadow, Prairie, Pampas, Veldt and Steppe - the world’s Grasslands.

🕐TIMESTAMPS🕖
0:00 Opening Montage
0:51 Introduction and Titles
1:48 What is Grass?
2:31 Grasslands vs Savannah
2:57 Related Climate Zones
3:19 Holdridge Lifezones Chart
3:36 Prairie, Steppe, Pampas, Veldt
5:01 Global Distribution, North America
6:15 South American Grasslands
6:48 Grasslands in Africa, New Zealand
7:20 Eurasian Grasslands
8:16 Grassland Plant Species
8:45 Grassland Fauna, Wildlife
9:11 Ecosystem Threats, Agriculture
10:00 Outro

Prairie is almost exclusively used to refer to the grasslands of North America, and is a word borrowed from the early French settlers to this region, meaning simply “meadow” in that language. Steppe refers mostly to the grasslands of Eurasia, and is taken directly from the Russian word for this biome. Pampas is the most common word for the extensive grasslands of mid-southern South America and is from the Quechua word for plain. Veldt, the Afrikaans word for field, is a loose term to describe the open upland country of eastern South Africa that is sometimes grassland but might also be scrub.

Grasslands can be found in these countries: Canada, USA, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, South Africa, New Zealand, Turkey, Iran, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China.

The domestication of various species of the grass family into cereal crops is regarded as one of the key developments of human civilisation. Wheat, corn, rice, barley, oats, millet, sugar and many more crops that directly, or through fodder for livestock, feed us, are all grasses. And so this humble family of plants that colonised the world and later went onto feed ours can be thought of in many ways as the most important in our world.

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FURTHER READING:

LONS08 - A new world natural vegetation map for global change studies - www.scielo.br/pdf/aabc/v80n2/a17v80n2.pdf

Holdridge Life Zones - www.researchgate.net/figure/Holdridge-Life-Zones-c…

Additional charts, maps and images along with the narrative script - click here:
👉 geodiode.com/biomes/grasslands
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📷📹🎥 VIDEO & PHOTO CREDITS ❤️❤️❤️
geodiode.com/biomes/grasslands#credits

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Research and Media Procurement Assistance, Spanish CC Translation: Richard Torres

Narrated, Written and Produced by
B.J.Ranson

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