Great Plains
The Great Plains, sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located just to the east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. It is the western part of the Interior Plains, which also include the mixed grass prairie, the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. Great Plains or Western Plains is also used to describe the ecoregion of the Great Plains, or alternatively the western portion of the Great Plains.
For other uses, see Great Plains (disambiguation).
Great Plains
Canada and the United States
1,100,000 sq mi (2,800,000 km2)
2,000 mi (3,200 km)
500 mi (800 km)
The Great Plains lies across both Central United States and Western Canada, encompassing:
Usage[edit]
The term "Great Plains" is used in the United States to describe a sub-section of the even more vast Interior Plains physiographic division, which covers much of the interior of North America. It also has currency as a region of human geography, referring to the Plains Indians or the Plains states.
In Canada the term is rarely used; Natural Resources Canada, the government department responsible for official mapping, treats the Interior Plains as one unit consisting of several related plateaus and plains. There is no region referred to as the "Great Plains" in the Atlas of Canada.[2] In terms of human geography, the term prairie is more commonly used in Canada, and the region is known as the Canadian Prairies, Prairie Provinces or simply "the Prairies".
The North American Environmental Atlas, produced by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agency composed of the geographical agencies of the Mexican, American, and Canadian governments, uses the "Great Plains" as an ecoregion synonymous with predominant prairies and grasslands rather than as physiographic region defined by topography.[3] The Great Plains ecoregion includes five sub-regions: Temperate Prairies, West-Central Semi-Arid Prairies, South-Central Semi-Arid Prairies, Texas Louisiana Coastal Plains, and Tamaulipas-Texas Semi-Arid Plain, which overlap or expand upon other Great Plains designations.[4]
Black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes) National Black-footed Ferret Conservation Center, Colorado
Swift fox (Vulpes velox), Colorado
Great Plains ratsnake (Pantherophis emoryi), Missouri
Great Plains toad (Anaxyrus cognatus)
American bison (Bison bison), Wichita Mountain Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma
The Great Plains before the native grasses were plowed under, Haskell County, Kansas, 1897, showing a man near a buffalo wallow
Cattle herd and cowboy, c. 1902
Wind power[edit]
The Great Plains contributes substantially to wind power in the United States. T. Boone Pickens developed wind farms after a career as a petroleum executive, and he called for the U.S. to invest $1 trillion to build an additional 200,000 MW of wind power in the Plains as part of his Pickens Plan. He cited Sweetwater, Texas, as an example of economic revitalization driven by wind power development.[71][72][73]