Ecosystems of the Great Plains: Scales, Kinds, and Distributions

Abstract

Perceptions about the Great Plains of the United States and Canada have varied widely through the historical development of the region. Emerging from the forests of Appalachia, early settlers initially noted the absence of trees in the Prairie Peninsula, where grassland extended into Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Because they viewed this as evidence of infertility, the settlers avoided the open prairies in favor of the scattered oak openings and floodplain forests of that area. In fact, some of the former glacial lake basins of the Prairie Peninsula were not drained and plowed until the early twentieth century, and draining of pothole lakes in the Northern Plains continues even now (Van der Valk 1989). As early as 1820, explorers of the western Great Plains perceived the region west of the 100th meridian as The Great American Desert and did not suppose that it would ever support much of a civilization (Frazier 1989; Lewis 1979). But, around mid-century, the Great Plains west of the Mississippi was settled rapidly, especially after the extension of railroads. As part of the commercial development by the railroads, the Great Plains was extolled as an agricultural paradise (Frazier 1989). But in the 1930s, the great drought and resulting dust storms recast the Great Plains as a dubious environment for agriculture after all—perhaps a kind of desert lurking between seductively good precipitation years.