Prairie

Prairie is a type of grassland that is characterized by the presence of grasses without many trees and a generally low altitude with few hills or other uplands. The prairie tends to promote the lifestyle of herders or nomads and has in more recent years become home to large-scale and often intensive agriculture which may have required the resettling of indigenous people away from their traditional lands.

Although it is possible to categorize the pampas of Argentina or the steppes of Central Asia as prairie, the term is more usually applied (particularly in the United States) to the rolling grassland that covers more than two million square miles of the central United States and extends into parts of Canada. These lands have become almost mythologized in ...