Prairie
Описание книги
Thorough, detailed, and scientifically up-to-date, Prairies: A Natural History provides a comprehensive nontechnical guide to the biology and ecology of the prairies, or the Great Plains grasslands of North America, offering a view of the past, a vision for the future, and a clear focus on the present. With a total area of more than 3.5 million square kilometers (500,000 in Canada and the remainder in the United States), the prairies occupy the heartland of the continent, a vast, windswept plain that flows from Alberta south to Texas and from the Rockies east to the Mississippi River. This is big sky country—the largest ecosystem in North America and, until recently, one of the richest and most magnificent natural grasslands in the world. Today, however, the North American prairies are among the most altered environments on Earth.
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{ PRAIRIE }
PRAIRIE
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The word “prairie” entered the English language in the 1680s, when fur traders first began edging across the North American continent. Initially, the term was applied to the area just west of the Mississippi River, where the grasses often grew so tall that a man mounted on horseback could not see over them. Later, as the Europeans pushed farther westward, they found themselves in a country of short, spiky plants, quite different in appearance from the Mississippi grasslands. To mark this distinction, the arid grasslands of the western plains were often referred to as “steppe,” a word the explorers borrowed from Russian. The term “prairie,” or “true prairie,” was reserved for the grasslands that the traders knew best, the tall, waving grasses of the eastern plains.
Although biologists continue to find it useful to classify grasslands by height—as short, tall, or mixed—they have dropped the old idea of true prairie. In contemporary usage, the terms “prairie” and “prairies” refer to any expanse of land that is dominated by grass and other nonwoody plants. Prairies, simply put, are grasslands. With the addition of the definite article, “the prairies” also serves as a regional designation for the great grasslands that sprawl across the interior plains of North America.
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