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Background
The prairie is a grassland biome with low to intermediate yearly rainfall and high summer temperatures. Grass and herbaceous plants dominate the landscape; flowers include sunflowers, blazing stars and milkweed. The rolling or flat landscape is typically lacking trees. Mammals, such as bison, prairie dogs and jackrabbits, populate the prairie, along with snakes, birds and spiders.
Prairies Only Exist in North America
Deserts, tundras and taigas can be found across the world, but the prairie is unique to North America. Prairies range from southern Canada down to northern Mexico and from the Rocky Mountains east to western Indiana. They cover around 1.4 million square miles in North America. Prairies are a subtype of the grassland biome: they are grasslands where tall grasses grow.
Fires are Beneficial to Prairies
Fires are hugely destructive to forests, so it might seem odd that they are considered beneficial to prairies. Fires kill young trees -- which keeps the prairie from turning into a forest -- and burn dead grass, making way for new growth. Plants on the prairie have even adapted to survive prairie fires by developing underground storage in the form of bulbs, rootstock and rhizomes. This allows them to grow again after a fire or seasonal change kills the above-ground portion of the plant.
Prairies Are Threatened
The grazing animals that inhabited the once-vast prairie enriched the soil with nitrogen through waste, and prairie dogs dug tunnels through the soil that helped aerate and irrigate it. This, combined with the decomposition of plant matter, has left the prairie's soil extremely fertile. Unfortunately, this means much of the prairie has been turned into agricultural land or otherwise disturbed by urban life; only one-to-two percent of the original prairie remains.