Slow and steady, the American prairies grow

A vibrant sea of grasses once flowed across the North American continent: the great prairies that Laura Ingalls Wilder described as “spreading to the edge of the sky.” All but a fraction vanished during the 19th century as migrants from Europe advanced across the heart of America, plowing the land into farms and settlements. “Most people, I think, would drive past a prairie and just see a lot of boring grass,” says Chris Helzer, director of science for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska and author of a popular prairie photography blog. Over the last three decades, a dedicated community of conservationists and land managers has worked to preserve American grasslands in all their manifold forms: the tallgrass, shortgrass, and mixed-grass prairies of the Midwest, as well as lesser-known varieties, such as the northwest prairies in Oregon and Washington, or the sandplain grasslands in Massachusetts.

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