American Prairie represents an unprecedented opportunity to restore and conserve a vast expanse of the prairie ecosystem in Montana’s legendary Northern Great Plains—one of only four places in the world with immediate potential to conserve temperate grassland at landscape scale. Not long ago, this region supported lives inextricable from its ecology, with people following bison herds, using fire to rejuvenate grasslands, and cultivating native vegetation alongside innumerable herds of bison and pronghorn, grizzly bears, wolves, elk, beaver, sage grouse, and vast flocks of migratory songbirds. That biodiversity was killed off throughout the nineteenth century, and while much shortgrass prairie habitat remains relatively intact and unplowed, most iconic wildlife have been extirpated. Today, temperate grasslands are one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world—less than five percent protected globally, with the Great Plains losing more intact grassland in recent years than the Brazilian Amazon has lost rainforest.
Why It Matters: Montana’s Great Plains remains intact and stable enough to support the same vast wildlife it did two centuries ago—making rewilding even a relatively small fraction significant to biodiversity at a global scale, when 96 percent of mammal weight on Earth is now humans and livestock. Prairies also play a fundamental role in mitigating climate change by storing carbon underground in vast root networks resistant to wildfire release, yet an estimated 57 million acres have been converted to cropland since 2009, with 1.3 million acres tilled annually, releasing carbon equivalent to 9.3 million cars. Without restoration and protection of the four remaining temperate grassland regions—including the Northern Great Plains—we risk an ecosystem being lost forever.
