Tag: grassland
Readers discuss grassland conservation and a hummingbird flight trick
Conservation considerations
The online mapping tool Landscape Explorer uses historical and modern aerial images to show how the American West’s landscapes have changed over the last 70 years, Brianna Randall wrote in “Landscape Explorer transports you back to a more wild West” (SN: 12/2/23, p. 32).
Randall wrote that Landscape Explorer has helped conservationists in Montana prioritize where to remove invasive trees that have taken root in grasslands, which threaten local biodiversity and increase the risk of catastrophic
Grassland and shrubland fires destroy more U.S. homes than forest fires
Forest fires can devastate vast swaths of land, but in the United States, another category of conflagrations takes the title of most destructive.
Of the homes destroyed in wildfires across the contiguous United States from 1990 to 2020, 64 percent — nearly 11,000 — were razed by grassland and shrubland fires, researchers report in the Nov. 10 Science.
“We often think about forest fires because that’s what we see on the news … they’re dramatic, they’re huge, they’re intense,”
Trees Are Overrated – The Atlantic
Once upon a time, not a blade of grass could be found on this planet we call home. There were no verdant meadows, no golden prairies, no sunbaked savannas, and certainly no lawns. Only in the past 80 million years—long after the appearance of mosses, trees, and flowers—did the first shoots of grass emerge. We know this in part because a dinosaur ate some, and its fossilized poop forever memorialized the plant’s arrival.
Grass then was still an