What is it about?
The purpose of the plowprint is to track annual grassland conversion to cropland across the Mississippi River Basin and Great Plains region, and to provide a way to measure the loss of this important habitat type, against which annual changes can be compared. This report tracks changes at the sub-regional scale, as well as in the context of the broader geography, and highlights key elements of change each year.
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Photo by George Bakos on Unsplash
Why is it important?
North America’s grasslands are one of the least protected and most at-risk biomes on the planet, and as the grasslands disappear so do the critical ecosystem services they provide. During the last decade, over 2 million acres of grasslands were converted to croplands each year across the US and Canadian Great Plains, rates comparable to the clearing of the Brazilian Amazon.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Tracking Cumulative Cropland Expansion across the Great Plains: The Plowprint, Great Plains Research, January 2021, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/gpr.2021.0006.
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