Biomes
Grassland
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A biome of open, grass-dominated terrain that receives too little rain to sustain a closed forest canopy but too much to become desert, shaped as much by fire and grazing pressure as by climate. Tropical grasslands, commonly called savanna, carry scattered drought-resistant trees and a sharply divided wet and dry season, best known through Africa's Serengeti; temperate grasslands, called prairie in North America, steppe in Eurasia and pampas in South America, carry few or no trees and a deep, fertile topsoil built up by centuries of grass root turnover, which has made many of the world's temperate grasslands into its most productive farmland.
Facts
Climate
Annual Precipitation (mm)Cited range runs 10 to 30 inches (roughly 250 to 760mm) a year for prairie-type temperate grassland; 650mm sits within it, not a single measured site. Typical Low Temperature (C)The cited January MEAN of about -7C (20F) is used directly here; individual cold snaps run considerably lower. Typical High Temperature (C)The cited July MEAN is about 21C; 30C here represents a typical hot summer day rather than the monthly mean, since prairie summer highs commonly exceed the mean by a wide margin. Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
Whittaker's own classic biome-climate diagram, published in Communities and Ecosystems (1975), plots vegetation type against mean annual temperature and precipitation and places tropical savanna and temperate grassland/desert in genuinely separate regions of that diagram rather than treating them as one grassland category. Carried here as a real disagreement in the classification literature this atlas draws from: this entry's own choice to fold savanna into one Grassland biome, following a common simplified convention, is not the only defensible reading, and a source as foundational to modern biome classification as Whittaker's own diagram drew the line differently.
A dissenting reading, from Robert H. WhittakerEncyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
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