Grasslands cover roughly a quarter of Earth’s land surface and exist on every continent except Antarctica. They span dozens of countries under a variety of local names: prairies in North America, pampas and cerrado in South America, steppes across Central Asia, savannas in Africa, and rangelands in Australia. The specific countries where you find major grassland systems depend partly on latitude and climate, but also on fire regimes, grazing animals, and soil conditions that keep trees from taking over.
North America
The most iconic grasslands in North America are the Great Plains, a vast expanse stretching from central Canada through the United States and into northern Mexico. In the US, the Great Plains once ran from western Indiana to the Rocky Mountain foothills and from Texas north into Montana and the Dakotas. Canada’s Prairie Provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba) are the northern continuation of this system, with mixed-grass and fescue prairie dominating. Mexico has smaller pockets of grassland in its northern highlands, particularly in Chihuahua and Durango.
Beyond the Great Plains, the US also hosts semi-arid grasslands in the desert Southwest. Research on bison grazing in Arizona’s Grand Canyon ecosystem has found that bison enhance plant production and nitrogen cycling in these high-elevation grasslands, with the most heavily grazed sites producing the highest plant biomass without crossing a degradation threshold.1PubMed Central. The role of bison (Bison bison) herbivory in the function of semi-arid grasslands of Arizona The sagebrush steppe of the Great Basin, covering parts of Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, and Utah, is another distinct grassland type where grazing by wild ungulates and livestock shapes plant community structure.2PubMed. Large herbivores in sagebrush steppe ecosystems: livestock and wild ungulates influence structure and function
South America
South America has several globally significant grassland systems distributed across multiple countries. Argentina’s Pampas are among the most productive temperate grasslands in the world, extending into Uruguay and the southernmost reaches of Brazil. These flat, fertile plains were shaped by centuries of cattle ranching and remain central to the region’s agricultural economy.
Brazil’s Cerrado is a tropical savanna covering roughly two million square kilometers in the country’s interior, making it the largest savanna in South America. It is recognized as a global biodiversity hotspot, but it faces intense pressure from soybean cultivation. An analysis of expanding agricultural protections found that without intervention, millions of hectares of native Cerrado vegetation could be converted to cropland by mid-century.3PubMed Central. Expanding the Soy Moratorium to Brazil’s Cerrado Colombia and Venezuela share the Llanos, a vast tropical grassland and wetland system that floods seasonally, while Patagonian steppe covers the arid southern tip of Argentina and Chile.
The Eurasian Steppe
The Eurasian steppe is the largest continuous grassland on the planet, stretching from Hungary in Europe to northeastern China. This corridor passes through or borders more countries than any other grassland system: Ukraine, southern Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, and China all contain substantial steppe territory.
Mongolia is often considered the heartland of the steppe. Research comparing soil and grass properties across Mongolia and China’s Inner Mongolia region has found that geographical coordinates, precipitation, and sheep grazing intensity are the most important variables shaping steppe vegetation, with latitude and longitude outweighing all other factors.4Journal of Geological Research. Factor Analysis of the Parameters of Samples of the Steppe Soil and Grass of Mongolia and Inland Mongolia of China on the Eastern Transsect of the Eurasian Steppe Kazakhstan’s steppe lands underwent dramatic transformation in the 1950s and 1960s during the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign, when millions of hectares of grassland were plowed for wheat production. That program brought development but also widespread soil degradation.5PubMed Central. The virgin lands campaign and the occurrence of foot-and-mouth disease and anthrax in the Republic of Kazakhstan (1955-1970)
In Europe, remnants of the steppe survive in Hungary’s Puszta, Romania’s Dobrogea, and patches across southern Ukraine and southwestern Russia. The Tibetan Plateau in China hosts a distinct alpine grassland that covers much of Tibet and Qinghai Province at elevations above 3,000 meters.
Africa
Africa contains the most extensive tropical grasslands and savannas on Earth. The East African savannas, stretching across Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Ethiopia, are the ecosystems most people picture when they think of grasslands: open plains dotted with acacia trees, grazed by wildebeest, zebra, and antelope. The Serengeti-Mara system alone covers around 30,000 square kilometers spanning Kenya and Tanzania.
Southern Africa has its own grassland belt running through South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, and parts of Mozambique. South Africa’s Highveld is a high-altitude grassland that covers much of the country’s interior and supports significant agriculture. West Africa has the Sahel, a semi-arid grassland-savanna transition zone stretching from Senegal and Mauritania eastward through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan. Madagascar also has extensive grasslands, though there is ongoing scientific debate about whether these are ancient ecosystems or the result of relatively recent deforestation.
Australia
Australia’s grasslands are unlike those found on any other continent. The most distinctive type is the spinifex hummock grassland, which covers at least 22% of the continent, dominating the vast sandplains, dunefields, and mountain ranges of arid and semi-arid inland Australia.6Applied Geochemistry. Spinifex biogeochemistry across arid Australia: Mineral exploration potential and chromium accumulation Hummock grasslands of this type are unique to Australia, though plants in the Americas and southern Africa have developed similar adaptations to extreme aridity through unrelated species.
Southeastern Australia also has temperate grasslands in Victoria and parts of New South Wales, though these have been heavily modified by agriculture and invasive species. Research on grassland restoration in southeastern Australia has found that prescribed fire can reduce exotic plant cover by about 39% on nutrient-poor soils, but the same fire treatment on nutrient-rich soils can actually harm native plants, reducing native grass and wildflower cover by 30% and 71% respectively.7Austral Ecology. The Effectiveness of Prescribed Fire for Native Grassland Restoration and Exotic Weed Control Differs Between Soil Types Northern Australia’s tropical grasslands extend across Queensland, the Northern Territory, and parts of Western Australia, often grading into open woodland.
Alpine Grasslands at High Elevations
Grasslands are not just a lowland phenomenon. High-elevation alpine meadows appear in mountain ranges around the world, often in countries you would not associate with open grassland. The Himalayas host alpine meadows across Nepal, Bhutan, India, and China. In Northwest Yunnan, China, these meadows sit within a global biodiversity hotspot, but between 1990 and 2009, at least 39% of alpine meadows there converted to woody shrubs.8Biological Conservation. Regime shift on the roof of the world: Alpine meadows converting to shrublands in the southern Himalayas
The European Alps maintain alpine grasslands above the treeline in Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy. The Ethiopian Highlands contain afroalpine grasslands at elevations above 3,500 meters. The Andes support puna and páramo grasslands in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. These high-altitude grasslands are typically too cold and windswept for trees, so they persist without the fire and grazing that maintain lowland grasslands.
What Keeps Grasslands From Becoming Forests
A natural question when looking at the global map of grasslands is why these areas have grass instead of trees. If climate were the only factor, grasslands would appear only in semi-arid regions too dry for forest and too wet for desert. In reality, grasslands exist in many places where rainfall could support trees. Researchers modeling the Eurasian forest-steppe have shown that climate variability, soils, topography, fire, and herbivores collectively push the boundaries of grassland and forest far beyond what average rainfall alone would predict.9PubMed Central. How climate, topography, soils, herbivores, and fire control forest-grassland coexistence in the Eurasian forest-steppe
Fire is one of the most important mechanisms. In North American grasslands, frequent fires can maintain open grassland by killing tree seedlings before they grow tall enough to survive. High-intensity fires are required to exclude shrubs and trees that can resprout from their roots, meaning that once woody plants get established, grasslands may not recover without especially severe burning.10Climate. Grassland Resilience to Woody Encroachment in North America and the Effectiveness of Using Fire in National Parks Large herbivores play a complementary role. In sagebrush steppe ecosystems, for instance, excluding all grazers led to increased shrub cover while plant species diversity actually dropped.2PubMed. Large herbivores in sagebrush steppe ecosystems: livestock and wild ungulates influence structure and function Grazers effectively prune woody plants and create disturbance that helps grass species thrive.
How Old Are the World’s Grasslands
The grasslands we see today are geologically recent. Grasses themselves have existed for tens of millions of years, but the vast open grasslands that dominate many continents expanded mostly in the late Miocene and early Pliocene, roughly four to eight million years ago.11PubMed Central. Atmosphere, ecology and evolution: what drove the Miocene expansion of C4 grasslands? The prevailing theory for decades was that falling atmospheric carbon dioxide gave certain grass species a competitive advantage over trees, but more recent geological evidence has complicated that picture. Fire regimes, shifting rainfall patterns, and the evolution of large grazing mammals all appear to have played roles in the spread of grasslands across continents.
Today, grasses that use a specialized photosynthetic pathway dominate tropical and subtropical savannas and account for roughly a fifth of all carbon captured by plants on land.11PubMed Central. Atmosphere, ecology and evolution: what drove the Miocene expansion of C4 grasslands? This means grasslands in countries like Kenya, Brazil, Australia, and India are not just ecologically distinct from temperate prairies; they run on a fundamentally different biological engine. The evolutionary split between tropical and temperate grasslands helps explain why you cannot simply transplant conservation strategies from one region to another.
Grasslands as Carbon Reservoirs
One reason grassland loss matters beyond individual countries is their role in the global carbon cycle. Grasslands store roughly one third of the world’s terrestrial carbon, with most of it locked underground in root systems and soil organic matter rather than in aboveground vegetation.12PubMed. Grassland soil carbon sequestration: Current understanding, challenges, and solutions This underground storage makes grassland carbon more resilient to fire than forest carbon. A grassfire releases carbon from burnt stems and leaves, but the soil carbon stays put. When grasslands are plowed for crops, however, that soil carbon is exposed to the atmosphere, turning a carbon sink into a carbon source.
This dynamic is playing out across many of the countries discussed above. In the United States, grasslands, including pasture and hayland, made up about 88% of all land converted to crop production in recent years.13Nature Communications. Cropland expansion in the United States produces marginal yields at high costs to wildlife In Brazil, the Cerrado faces similar conversion pressure. In Kazakhstan, the scars of mid-20th-century plowing are still visible in degraded soils. The pattern is consistent worldwide: grasslands are easier and cheaper to convert to farmland than forests are, so they tend to disappear first.
Why Grassland Conservation Gets Less Attention Than Forests
Despite being widespread and ecologically critical, grasslands receive far less conservation attention than forests do. A 2025 study in Science found that nature conservation policies around the world are biased toward forests and neglect grassy ecosystems, and that this imbalance has contributed to grasslands disappearing at higher rates than forests in many regions.14PubMed. Nature conservation policies are biased toward forests and neglect grassy ecosystems worldwide Part of the reason is perception: forests look valuable, with their towering canopies and charismatic wildlife, while grasslands can appear empty or “unused” to policymakers.
Tree-planting programs have sometimes made the problem worse. Well-intentioned afforestation projects in countries like India, China, and several African nations have planted trees on native grasslands, destroying grassland habitat in the name of environmental improvement. Because the carbon stored in grassland soils is invisible compared to the obvious biomass of a forest, tree planting on grassland can actually reduce ecosystem services while appearing to increase them.
Restoration of degraded grassland is possible but complicated. In the United States, prescribed fire combined with herbicides can promote native warm-season grasses over invasive species, though the wrong combination sometimes encourages a different set of unwanted plants.15Restoration Ecology. Restoration of Native Warm Season Grassland Species in a Tall Fescue Pasture Using Prescribed Fire and Herbicides In Australia, the same prescribed fire treatment that successfully controls exotic weeds on nutrient-poor soils can backfire on nutrient-rich soils, making restoration a site-specific puzzle rather than a blanket solution.7Austral Ecology. The Effectiveness of Prescribed Fire for Native Grassland Restoration and Exotic Weed Control Differs Between Soil Types
A Quick Reference by Region
For a reader who simply wants a list, here are the major grassland systems and the countries where they are found:
- North American Prairies: United States, Canada, northern Mexico
- Eurasian Steppe: Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, China
- South American Pampas: Argentina, Uruguay, southern Brazil
- Cerrado: Brazil (interior)
- Llanos: Colombia, Venezuela
- Patagonian Steppe: Argentina, Chile
- East African Savannas: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Somalia
- Southern African Grasslands: South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Zimbabwe, Mozambique
- Sahel: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan
- Australian Grasslands: All mainland Australian states and territories, with spinifex hummock grasslands covering at least 22% of the continent
- Tibetan Plateau: China (Tibet, Qinghai), parts of India
- Himalayan Alpine Meadows: Nepal, Bhutan, India, China
- Andean Puna and Páramo: Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela
- European Alpine Grasslands: Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy, Spain
The variety of names and settings reflects a deeper truth about grasslands: they are not a single ecosystem but a broad category of treeless or mostly treeless habitats maintained by different combinations of climate, fire, soil, and animal activity. Two grasslands in the same country can share almost nothing in common ecologically, while grasslands on opposite sides of the planet can face identical threats from agricultural conversion and woody plant encroachment. That combination of global reach and local specificity is what makes them both widespread and difficult to protect.