Short Grass Prairie

Map

Potential Issues/Conflicts

Reed Canary Grass

Invasive species are a major threat to the ecoregion’s biological diversity.

• Cheatgrass, Russian-olive, reed canary grass, saltcedar, eastern red-cedar, narrow-leaf cattails, and other species have competitively excluded native plants and degraded habitat for fish and wildlife. Mountain pine beetles have also recently entered the region and may become problematic in pine woodlands.

Residents have limited opportunity to learn about the region’s native plant and animal species.

• Most school-aged children and adults know little about the area’s species and threats to biological diversity. Landowners have limited access to information on management methods that can be used to sustain natural communities and biological diversity on their land.

Mountain Pine Beetles

Natural Resources

A couple Natural Resources are

• Oil and Gas
• Gold
• Silver
• Copper
• Bio fuels
• Geothermal

Human Uses

Short Grass Prairie

Copper

• Humans use the Short grass plains through tiled agriculture, urban development, and industry – that have altered the character of the prairie’s grasslands and substantially decreased the number and diversity of native herbivores (like American bison and American elk), carnivores, and grassland birds.
• Also much of the Short grass Prairie is currently cultivated or grazed by domestic livestock, with a human population that remains principally dependent on agriculture, although both energy exploration and mining have increased.
• Couple things that could be mined are gold, silver, copper.

Animal Inhabitants

• Animals that live in the plains must adapt to wide open spaces with few trees.
• Most animals either live in the ground or have adapted to travel long distances while needing only a little water.
• Birds also habitat these regions of the short grass prairies. Some example of these birds are sparrows and other small birds that live off the abundant insects, seeds from grass, and small plants. Also migratory birds, like great Blue Heron and Canada goose. The plains are a great place for birds of prey to hunt small rodents, rabbits, snakes, etc....

Blue Heron

By: Samuel Lee, Dylan Kargarzadeh, Bronson Townsie

Vegetation

• Few plants live in the Short grass plains besides grass due to lack of precipitation, being windy, and extreme temperatures from summer to winter. This is the reason why the name Short grass prairie was given which is because there were not many plants other than a plain covered in short grasses.
• The few plants that exist are Soapweed Yucca and Plains Prickly Pear Cactus and sometimes Spring Flowers may grow
• The dominant grasses of the semi-arid prairie include buffalo grass, blue grama, and western wheatgrass.

Soapweed Yuuca

Climate

Colorado Great Plains

• The region lies in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains
• As precipitation increases to the east – primarily in the form of summer rains – mixed-grass prairie communities also occur.
• Its cold, dry winters and warm to hot summers are frequently punctuated by extreme weather like hail, blizzards, tornadoes, and dust storms.
• A recent analysis of a global climate model projects a 12° F (6.7° C) warming for the Central Shortgrass Prairie in the next century, along with up to an 8% decrease in average annual precipitation.

blizzards

Dust Storms

Topography

• Topography- The arrangement of the natural and artificial physical features of an area.
• The Short grass prairie ecosystem of the North American Great Plains is a prairie that includes lands from the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains east to Nebraska and north into Saskatchewan, including rangelands in Alberta, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas, and extending to the south through the high plains of Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico.
• Short grass Prairie ecoregion spans eight states on the west-central edge of the Great Plains.