The answer to the OP’s question seems clear to me. The great plains are just like other similar areas around the world, steppes, savannas, llanos, Nullarbor Plain in Australia, and are the result of climate and not human activity.
I wouldn’t quite go so far as that either. I would say that for the westernmost and most arid parts of the Great Plains, the natural climax vegetation is short-grass prairie. It certainly was not forest or even savanna. Farther east, human activity, especially increased burning, probably did affect the actual ecotone between forest, savanna, and ultimately grassland. The Great Plains grassland ecosystem is certainly not completely anthropogenic; however, humans have affected the actual distribution of trees for a long time.
I didn’t mean to imply and I don’t think I said that humans had no effect on the vegetation and corformation of the great plains. All I’m saying is that the great plains are a result of their climate which results from topography and geograph and even without human habitation would look pretty much as they do in any case. Yes, there are changes due to human activities, irrigation, etc. but the arguments here that the indians created the great plains with their agricultural activies are nonsense.
In view of things like the dust bowl of the 1930s it would be foolish to say that human habitation doesn’t affect the land and I don’t think I said any such thing…
Then by this defintion cattle and nmopst dogs aren’t domesticated, as evdeinced by the fat that cattle and dogs go feral everywhere they are allowed to roam unconstrained.
Well farmed bison certainly meet all those requirements.
Cite!
Accroding to Jared Diamond, Florida State University. and the Univeristy of Idaho amongst many other highly reputable sources bison are indeed domesticated.
This is a ridiculous argument. It is an exact North American equivalent to plans to turn the Amazon into fertile farmland and I am astounded that anyone in the US in the 20th century actually believes it. It could only possibly be made by someone who simply doesn’t understand that having lots of trees doesn’t make Amazon of the Ghats or the Great Plains capable of being transformed into farmland.
If you are really interested in being educated into why tree density doesn’t give an indication of arable potential then by all means start a new thread and I will happlily enlighten you, but let’s not sidetrack this one with silly arguments that have no basis in reality.
But you haven’t explained why trees exist in huge numbers in much drier regions in Asia, Australia and to a lesser extent in South America. Rainfall certainly makes these areas incapable of ever being cultivated, but it has in no way prevented woody vegetaion from dominating. Indeed woody vegetation has a massive competitive advatage under conditions of moisture limitation.
Why would the Great Plains be the only place on the planet where trees were incapable of evolving to occupy sub-humid environments? Once again your argument shows a gross misunderstanding of basic ecology and plant physiology.
Nope. What makes no sense is your assumption that merely having lots of trees somehow makes an area fertile and suitable for cultivation if the trees can be removed. Suffice it to say such a poisiton is ignorant rubbish, has been well debunked and is no longer accpeted by any ecologist or agronomist.
Once we accept that indisputable fact then we can see why your argument that "if the Great Plains could grow trees the mighty USA would have converted it to fertile farmland is senseless.
No they weren’t. The Indians of the Great plains were often true HGs with no agriculture. As with almost all other HGs they were highly nomadic and in no way staionary.
Nonsense, there were numerous HG groups that live son the plains themselves. Do you really think that humans could survive in the Namib or Gobi or Simpson deserts as HGs but find life on the Great Plains impossible?
I have never heard anyone suggest that humans never lived across virtually all of the on the Great Plains. Can you please provide evidence for this extraordinary assertion?
You apparently don’t realise that it is now accepted by the majority of ecologists and archaeologists that a population of less than 1 million people deforested a much, much larger area of Australia.
Gak. This is exactly what we are finding. The process is variously known as “woodland thickening” “woody plant encroachment" and “brush encroachment” and is well described in grasslands and open woodlands worldwide, including the Great Plains.
Woody plant encroachment onto the Great Plains
More woody plant encroachment onto the Great Plains
Woody plant invasion of the southern Great Plains
More woody plant invasion of the southern Great Plains
Encroachment in a sand prairie, Illinois
Encroachment in hill and bluff prairies, Wisconsin
encroachment all over the Midwest
And those are just results found in half a second on Google. Expansion of woody plants into previously open areas of the Great Plains is extremely well documented and in almost every case attributed to removal of regular fires.
The most likely reason that the process is less pronounced than what we find in Africa and Australia is because the Indians did such a spectacular job of denuding the area that seeds have to travel huge distances to recolonise.
The standard explanation is because the more eremophilous trees that naturally survive din these areas had become locally extinct. Once again suggesting that trees don’t; survive there demands an explanation why trees survive in moire arid conditions elsewhere in the world.
It is obviously perfectly correct because many temperate woodlands also have a rainfall regime of between 10-35 inches of rain per year. As such rainfall clearly doesn’t explain why one area is woodland and one area is grassland.
Easily done. This is hardly uncommon knowledge and I am a little surprised that an ecologist of your standing is unaware of this.
"Acacia open forests and woodlands of southern Australia
In areas of the southeast and south of the central Australian Acacia shrublands most open forests and woodlands are dominated by Eucalyptus spp… However North of the Great Australian Bight as far west as Spencer Gulf Eucalyptus open forests and woodlands are infrequent and there are large areas of woodlands and open woodlands characterised by trees such as western Myall (Acacia papyrocarpa), Casuarina cristata and Myoporum platycarpum. Apart from A. papyrocarpa, myall A. pendula is the only other species of Acacia which forms woodland communities over considerable areas in Southern Australia….
The most charcteristic species is mulga (Acacia aneura). Mulga communities together with mixed mulga/hummock grass communities and mulga mid-height grass communities occupy about 1, 500, 000 km^2 or about 20% of the total area of the continent. A. aneura is mostly found in areas receiving from 200 to 500mm mean annual rainfall, but is conspicuously absent from the semi-arid regions with a regular summer or winter drought….
The most extensive Acacia woodland formation excluding the A. aneura woodlands and those of northeastern Australia is that characterised by A. papyrocarpa. It forms woodlands to 10m in height in the 200-250mm rainfall belt to the Northwest of Port Ausgusta and Whyalla in South Australia and extends into Western Austalia as a fringe skirting the Nullabor plain.
Johnson, R.W. and Burrows, W.H. “Acacia open forests, woodlands and shrublands” in “Australian vegetation, R.H. Groves ed. Cambrdge Univeristy Press 1993.
I could go on quoting for this book for pages on the massive extent of woodlands in Southern Australia in regions below 400mm rainfall, and I haven’t even touched on the eucalypt woodlands and chenopod shrublands yet, but these few paragraphs clearly establish that there are indeed millions of square kilometres of temperate arid woodland on the continent.
Unfortunately I don’t have my copy of Bell on me, which would provide the best evidence of forest and woodland on central Asia. But this is so mundane that I’ll just use Synergy to pull out a couple of articles outlining the taiga woodlands and forests of Northern China and Tibet.
“Annual precipitations at the closest weather stations 42 or 87 km, respectively W Khonin Nuga Research Station varies between 250 and 260 mm. The Khentey Mountains were classified as a part of the temperate zone already by Meusel et al. (1965) and Hilbig and Knapp (1983). This view is supported by the present results, as more than the half of the vascular plant species investigated have their main occurrence in the temperate zone. The central Siberian forests form the interface between western Siberian dark taiga forests of Picea obovata, Abies sibirica, Pinus sibirica, and Larix sibirica and eastern Siberian taiga forests of Pinus sylvestris, L. gmelinii, Betula platyphylla, and species related to the two latter species (Walter and Breckle, 1986). This is why tree diversity in central Siberia is higher than in other parts of Siberia. In the Khentey Mountains, these diverse central Siberian forests border on the Mongolian–Daurian forest steppe. This situation yields a unique mixture of dark taiga, light taiga and forest steppe vegetation types (Dulamsuren et al., 2005). Plant diversity is especially high in the western Khentey Mountains, as many dark taiga species thin out in the drier eastern and southern parts of the Khentey.”
Choimaa Dulamsuren, Erik Welk, Eckehart J. Jäger, Markus Hauck and Michael Mühlenberg. Range-habitat relationships of vascular plant species at the taiga forest-steppe borderline in the western Khentey Mountains, northern Mongolia
Flora - Morphology, Distribution, Functional Ecology of Plants
Volume 200, Issue 4, 1 August 2005,
“Moreover, trees of Ulmus pumila are found over a wide precipitation range, and even grow in zonal desert steppes of southern Mongolia (Lindeman, 1981). Isolated trees, and sometimes even extended open forests, occur in semi-desert vegetation with Stipa glareosa and Anabasis brevifolia at sites with a mean annual precipitation of less than 130 mm (Wesche et al., 2005)…. The climate of the study site reflects the extremely continental situation of Mongolia… The average annual precipitation in Dalanzadgad is 131 mm (1937–1999, after data from the Meteorological Service of Mongolia), 70% of which falls in June, July and August. …Results of biogeographical, ecological and palaeoecological analyses support the view that today’s most isolated mountain forests in Central Asia persist due to self-supporting meso-climatic effects. These meso-climatic effects are related to the presence of permafrost-layers sheltered by the closed canopy of dwarf birch–willow forest. Larix charcoal and pollen analyses indicate that those birch–willow forests were once connected to a much more extensive taiga forest that was reduced by climatic shifts and human influence during the warm and dry middle Subboreal at around 4350 cal yr BP in the Gobi Altay and 3800 cal yr BP in the southern Mongolian Altay.
Georg Miehe, Frank Schlütz, Sabine Miehe, Lars Opgenoorth, Jan Cermak, Ravčigijn Samiya, Eckehart J. Jäger and Karsten Wesche. “Mountain forest islands and Holocene environmental changes in Central Asia: A case study from the southern Gobi Altay, Mongolia” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, Volume 250,
Honestly not being snide in any way Colibri, but you not knowing that vast areas of sub-humid Australia and Central Asia are or at least were naturally covered in woodland or even forest vegetation surprises me. None of this is even vaguely controversial. I’m assuming there’s been some misunderstanding here somewhere.
-
Savannas are treed. They are woodlands. They are what the Great Plains mostly were, not in any way similar to what they are. If you don’t realise this then you really have no place making comments like this.
-
Best evdience suggests that many if not most steppes are anthropogenic, just as the Great Plains are. I just provided a reference to this effect. The evidence for this is great, and growing, and comes from pollen analysis, C13 analysis, climatological modelling and archaeology amongst a great many other sources.
-
The Nullabor plain is characterised by extreme aridity and extemely shallow and infertile soils and is in no way comparable to the Great Plains, yet despite all this large areas of the Nullabor are still dominated by woody vegetation.
Look David at this juncture I’m going to ask you for some actual evidence. No more cryptic comments. No more non-sequitur cut-n-paste. I have produced evidence that the Great Plains are indeed naturally treed. I have produced evidence that absent human burning they are once again reverting to a treed state. I have provided evidence that areas far drier and far colder support trees elsewhere in the world.
At this point I want to see your evidence that the Great Plains are indeed naturally the result of climate. And for your assertion that steppes are the result of climate and not human activity. And your assertion that the Nullabor is naturally not dominated by woody vegetation. And your assertion that savannas are naturally treeless rather than co-dominated by trees.
I don’t know what it is about the life sciences that makes every man and his dog assume they are experts and capable of forming as accurate an impression as those of us who have studied the subject for decades. But right now it should stop and you should start presenting your evidence and your refernces and evidence for your claims.
Ah the old if you don’t understand this by now I can’t explain it to you bit. Yes, savannas have trees, but the OP said “forested” as in
The first cite I posted from North Dakota State, and I included the whole article, stated clearly that the primeval great plains had been grasslands for the past 8000 to 10000 years.
Look Blake. Don’t patronize.
The OP dealt with the origin of the great plains, not what is going on now after 150 years of intenstive human occupation and interference.
So are you now fully agreeing with me and saying that large areas of the Great Plains were indeed treed savannas prior to human influence?
If so then I fail to see why you spent so long arguing against me when I said this repeatedly. It becomes totally mystifying why you have been questioning that the Great Plains were treed, that the eastern forests weren’t deforested and so forth. if you accept they were treed savannas.
If not then I totally fail to see what point you are making here.
So what is your point? Humans have inhabited the Great Plains for… wait for it… about 8000 to 10000 years. How does this in any way support an assertion that the Great Pains weren’t treed before human intervention? How does it support your position that no HGs live don the Great Plains? How does it in any way invalidate the evidence that human influence has shaped the vegetation of the Great Plains and converted large areas from savanna to true grassland?
Can you not see that the fact that the trees retreated at approximately the same time as people arrived doesn’t actually support your position and if any seems to support the idea that humans are responsible.
I don’t patronise. I do get testy with people who clearly don’t understand some very basic concepts yet persist in arguing a subject that I have studied for decades in GD. But then again you try arguing quantum physics with some of our more knowledgeable physicists or history with some of our historians in the manner you do here with ecological history and I guarantee you will get the same reaction.
If you have questions that’s great. If you have a counter-view based on fact or storng personal knowledge that’s even better. Certainly my position isn’t universally accepted. But when you argue based on an apparent ignorance of the time of arrival of humans (or at least post-Clovis humans) and an inability to understand such fundamentals as that fire has greater aboricidal effect in dry climates then we have a problem.
Deleted duplicate post.
To address this later edit:
It is preciely the origin of the great PLains that I am adressing.
Look can you tell us in simple terms: are you disputing that large areas of the Great Plains were treed savanna before Indian action deforested them or are you not?
If you are disputing that then show your evidence.
If you are not disputing that then precisely what in my posts are you disputing, because we seem to be in total and complete agreement.
If we agree on the definition of savanna in this site then I think we don’t have much to argue about.
So a savanna is a grassland with some scattered trees.
My cite from NDSU says that the trees retreated northward as the glaciers shrank leaving behind grasslands. It isn’t impossible that there were scatterd trees and shrubs mixed in.
I do question whether the first inhabitants would have bothered to burn down the trees. When you have a small population and are planting and cultivating with pointed sticks a few scattered trees won’t interfere so why bother? However if someone wants to argue that they did burn the trees, OK.
I read your cites and the first one puzzled me. It was a 46 page article on bison management in Yellowstone Park and environs. I didn’t read it word for word but I didn’t find any reference to encroachment of woody plants into the great plains. The next ones dealt with such encroachment today. All that proves is that small, drought resistant, woody plants can live in areas with rainfall between 10 and 30 inches. Hell, no one ever disputed that. I live on a desert with an average rainfall of about 5 inches and there are greasewood bushes which are woody plants all over the place. Such information doesn’t prove that the great plains were that way in the beginning, only that they might have been and I don’t dispute that.
My dispute has been withthis post and the implication that the great plains were covered with “vast forests” before humans came along and burned them down. I though I said that in a recent post.
The great plains biome results from being in an area that is sheltered from moist air by the mountais to the west and so they are grasslands. If you want to scatter a few trees around, fine.
Close enough, but be careful what you imagine when you say “scattered trees. The savanna of the Great Plains would have been like this.
When ecologists and botanists referred to savannas as being characterised by scattered trees they mean the trees are sufficiently small and widely spaced to allow sunlight to reach the ground, not that there are any fewer trees than one finds in a forest. Because of the sunlight availability savannas often have far higher tree densities than forests. ”. I can quote you endless references from peer reviewed journals showing savanna tree densities numbering in the hundreds per hectare. The above picture of a tallgrass savanna represents a system that has a higher tree density than many North American forests.
So if there were trees and shrubs left behind as this sort of savanna why have you been repeatedly saying that the climate prevents trees and shrubs from surviving?
Like I said, I get annoyed when someone who is obviously grossly ignorant of the topic tries to argue with someone who has actually studied it. When I am on the receiving end I get doubly irritated.
- The first inhabitants were not cultivating anything. The first inhabitants were HGs. Even when the Indians were eventually displaced there were still numerous HG tribes who didn’t cultivate anything, and many more groupe who were horse herders who cultivated little or nothing. In short the Indians of the Great Plains were never exclusively agriculturalists, and certainly not “the first inhabitants”.
- The main reason Indians burned was not to clear agricultural land. I repeat not to clear agricultural land. That is about the 3rd time I have said that very clearly. Indians burned primarily to produce favoured habitat for gathered resources.
- Nobody is suggesting that scattered trees were ever removed because they interfere with agriculture. See 3 above. In the case of more open savanna there are numerous reasons why HGs and semi-HGs like the Indians burned regularly. Primarily it was to promote favoured species whether by providing green feed or by protecting fire sensitive areas. Land was also burned as part of warfare, to control pests and disease, to make it easier to travel, to remove the threat of fire from encampments or farmland and simply because such people mostly don’t care enough to prevent wildfires. But despite the reasons the fires still have the same effect: favouring grasses.
Whoops. That was link to domesticated bison from earlier in the thread. It seems to have gotten crosslinked. Nonetheless the rest do establish the phenomenon of encroachment and includes the one I intended to link to.
WTH? You have spent copious amounts of time saying that rainfall alone will prevent woodlands from establishing in this area and ensure they remain devoid of trees.
I repeat, please clearly present your position. Tell us clearly whether you deny that the Great Plains region is environmentally capable of supporting trees or not.
BTW we are not dealing with “small, drought resistant, woody plants”. Had you read the references you would note we are dealing with species including cedar, Juniper and pinyon which are not small.
It was never intended to prove that “the great plains were that way in the beginning”.
It was intended to highlight the ignorance in your statement that after 200 years of Indian absence we should be seeing areas that are being invaded by trees. Are you now willing to admit that you were totally ignorant of the widespread occurrence of such areas and admit that we do in fact see them?
WTF?. That has not been your dispute. You have been repeatedly disputing my posts. I didn’t make that post. I never made any posts which even imply agreement with that post.
Look David for the last time, just tell us clearly what your position is and exactly which part of my posts you have been continually disputing, because at this stage it isn’t at all clear. You hav e been quoting my posts and making cryptic comments disputing something, but at this point I can’t work out what it is.
Bollocks. If you want to make this sort of statement then provide your evidence and answer the questions your position raises. If you can’t do that then you are either totally ignorant or at best regurgitating other people’s views with zero understanding.
If what you say is the case then why are large areas now converting to savanna woodland despite a general decrease in precipitation over the last 200 years? You’ve already admitted that drought tolerant trees can survive perfectly well on the Great Plains absent human fires.
Then explain why on the entire planet it is only in the New World that trees have been unable to evolve to grow in arid regions when they naturally occupy vast areas in far drier habitats in Australia and Asia?
Yep, as I thought you don’t understand what a prairie savanna actually is. We are not talking a few scattered trees here. We are talking tree densities from 50-200 plants per hectare. That is greater than the density in many US many forest areas.
Honestly David, you show no signs of having researched this subject, no signs of understanding what the ecosystems we are discussing even look like, much less how they function and no signs of understanding how Indians utilised fire.
Yet you insist on disputing what I say… and worse yet you can’t even clearly articulate what you are disputing.
I’ll make it simple for you David. Are you or are you not denying that large sections of the Great Plains were prairie savanna such as this prior to Indian interference? And are you denying that large sections of the Great Plains are capable of supporting such savannas even under today’s somewhat drier conditions given suitable management?
One complicating factor is that post-glacial ecosystem changes due to climate change have been going on at the same time as ecosystem changes due to population activity. Going from ice to prairie in about twelve thousand years (meanwhile passing through glacial lake, tundra, savanna, and whatever else the pollen cores indicate) is in itself a lot of changes in a biologically short time.
Likewise, Native American populations and cultures have been going through a lot of changes during this same time; many of which I doubt we know. In the Southwest, major irrigation systems existed and then vanished. In the Northern plains, travelers’ sketches from the 1800’s show the Dakota living in agricultural villages along the rivers, with hunting forays onto the prairies. I’m not sure we have the archaeological evidence to say much about land use in the Plains area even a thousand years ago. And it is becoming clear that population die-off on exposure to European diseases was catastrophically substantial and easily large enough to leave surviving cultures and their land use hardly recognizable if you’d known them before disease hit; so that extrapolation from what was there to be observed in the 1800’s is risky.
Having said that: it is clear that the Eastern Great Plains can indeed support woodlands, and that wooded areas have increased in this area since European settlement and a decrease in burning. Compare late 1800’s photographs of new towns in western Minnesota with what you can see in the area today; in Pipestone National Monument, for example, you can walk in what looks like established woodland over area that early photographs show as prairie.
One category in which human activity may well have made substantial differences is when post-glacial climate change brought ecosystems to “tipping points”, where the land could sustain two different ecosystems, and over-grazing (for example) is enough to push it from one into the other. As I understand it, for example, parts of Arizona were lush grassland in the early 1800’s, and arid semi-desert now; the difference being cattle.
In the growth rings of ancient logs, in the SouthWest, one can trace the cycle of droughts. The Anasazi abandoned their cliff dwellings around 1300AD, because of a severe drought that lasted for decades-could these people have migrated east to the Great Plains? Since the Indians lived off the Bison, it is logical that they would do things to increase the bison herds-including burning woodlands. So it may well be that the GPs were a landscape substantially altered by humans. Also, I read recently about attempts to re-establish the "tall grass’ prairies (in selected areas): has this been successful? or do the fenced-off areas revert to trees instead/
Here is another stie dealing withsavannas. Here is the first sentence of that article
The emphasis is that it is a grassland.
Now let’s examine your statement that there can be 50 to 200 trees per hectare. A hectare is a little over 107000 sq. ft. I used 108000 sq. ft. in order to be generous. If there are 50 trees/hectare that means there is one tree in every patch of ground 46 ft. on a side, on average. For 200 trees/hectare there is one tree in avery 23 ft by 23 ft patch on average.
The trees most mentioned as growing on savannas are acacia and baobab. The acacia’s dimensions when mature are listed as 30-45 ft tall and 30-45 ft across. The baobab comes in at up to 25 meters, just over 75 ft., tall, and, as the picture in the cite shows, with a thick trunk. To describe as “scattered” a density of trees such as these in patches as small as 23 or 46 ft. on a side robs “scattered” of meaning.
I’m beginning to suspect that you are just making up definitions to suit yourself and further discussion is fruitless…
Boys, boys, boys! It is, as Colibri said, generally accepted that the western Great Plains have been semi-arid, shortgrass prairie, or steppe, since the glaciers then the forests retreated thousands of years ago and the climate dried. This area would’ve been grassland with a few widespread trees without human interference.
It is also accepted, as pretty much any researcher will tell you (and has in the links in this thread), that the eastern Great Plains are mostly subtropical or temperate midgrass prairie or savanna (whichever you prefer–savanna is apparently what some Indians called it while prairie is French), and that area to the east of it is tallgrass prairie. Those same researchers will tell you that both midgrass and tallgrass prairies are created and maintained by fire, both naturally and artificially set, and that the Indians cleared the land to improve foraging for themselves and their prey animals. These people also farmed bottomland near rivers but lived higher up so their homes wouldn’t be flooded.
There really isn’t much room for argument. This has all been known for many, many years.
We have a small one at a preserve my wife worked at and it is a constant battle to keep out the trees and non-native species.
Of course a savanna is a bleedin’ grassland. A grassland is any ecosystem dominated or co-dominated by grass. I already said that. That is why terms like grassland are so bloody useless. That is why actual ecologists try to stick to terms like woodland or open forest or savanna for these systems.
Look dude at this juncture you open display of ignorance is to startling for words.
Quite simply if you dispute that savannas commonly have tree densities of 50-200 trees/ha then say so. I will provide as many references for that fact as you would like. Your half arsed attempts at extrapolation on a subject of which you are clearly grossly ignorant are simply ridiculous when there are literally thousands of peer reviewed articles stating quite clearly that savannas and even specifically prairie savannas commonly support 50-200 trees/ha.
If you want evidence, just ask. If you want to argue based on assumption pulled out of your arse then kindly go elsewhere. This is the place for factual answers.
This is a joke, right? “The trees most mentioned”? WTF is that based on? And why is it even relevant?
Do you realise that the ** genus** Acacia is one of the most diverse, if not the single most diverse, of all the woody pant genera? Of course you don’t, what a silly question. You are totally ignorant of this subject but persist in arguing anyway.
Suffice it to say that anyone who refers to “the acacia” or even attempts to give dimensions size for a genus that encompasses species in excess of 40 metres height down to shrubs less than 50cm at maturity is talking through their arse.
OTOH I do believe I may save this thread for presentation at conference and meeting just to point out why we have so much difficulty educating this to the public, especially in America. Rest assured that when a group of actually ecologists and botanists see someone referring to sizes for “the acacia” it will get more than a few titters.
Yep, I’m definitely saving this thread for presentation now. This is priceless. Anyone who attempts to calculate savanna tree density based on overmature boab densities is just to precious for words. 
I have already provided numerous references for every request made so far. Like I said, any time you want evidence I will present any number of references to support any claim I have made here. In contrast you won’t even answer simple question.
You can’t even explain what it is in my posts that you are objecting to. You see to be disputing that large areas of the Great Plains originally supported savanna of the type pictured above. You also seem to be disputing that savannas are frequently characterised by tree densities 0f 50-200 plants. But you have carefully avoided saying so despite being repeatedly asked outright so that you can’t be simply silenced with the sheer weight of references that prove otherwise.
In short I have no idea what your purpose actually is in this thread seeing as you are providing neither factual content nor questions.
No, that simply isn’t true. We know that large areas of the western Great Plains have been savanna woodland during that period. Maybe if you has said that significant portions or arguably even most of the Wesern Great Plains. But to say just the Western Great Plains as a whole is just plain [heh] wrong.
Once again, be wary of what you imagine when you say “a few widespread trees”. Widespread trees in prairie savannas is normally something in the region of 50-200 trees/ha. I am not sure that is what you mean when you say “A few trees”.
Once again, take great care with your terminology here. Prairie these days almost exclusively refers to an area dominated by grass. A savanna is tree/grass co-dominant. The terms haven’t been used interchangeably as you just did for almost a generation now.
There is certainly room for argument based on what you actually just posted and base don what the scientific literature says, particularly your claim that the western Great Plains have been grassland for over 8, 000 years.
This I think may be the problem. The knowledge of the history of the Great Plains has changed dramatically on the last 25-20 years due in large part to techniques such as radiocarbon isotope analysis.
But the MAJORITY of the western Great Plains was not savanna woodland, to the extent that most researchers are content to describe it as “steppe”: semi-arid, shortgrass prairie with a few shrubs and trees, mostly concentrated along water courses. If you have evidence to the contrary I’d like to see it.
It is not, but since the area was not prairie savanna, it does not matter.
Just because so many people misuse a term that other people give up arguing with them (or die of old age) doesn’t make them right and the original, CORRECT usage wrong. 
Could you please supply a reference that does NOT say that the western Great Plains have been shortgrass prairie since the retreat of the Boreal forests during the Hypsithermal period, between 9000 and 5000 years ago? I ain’t findin’ NUTTIN’.
Could you provide some cites of that? I can’t get at anything useful without joining a professional organization.
drop, fighting a rearguard action against obfuscation, modernism, and the reduced use of commas
PS - By the way, as my mom says, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar. Maybe you can reflect on the hostility other people pick up in your posts, hostility that I’m sure is not there, but, with the limited expressiveness in the printed word, comes across loud and clear, anyway.
I agree with Dropzone. Sure on the Eastern side, there may have been enough trees for some to have called it a forest. But the Western side was a grassy plain with an occassional scattered tree.
Frankly we do not know what the motivation was of the Pre-Columbian American natives in most cases. We have no written records and folklore only goes back so far.
This is my favourite thread right now. I can almost smell the blood.