What are the Canadian grasslands?

The Canadian grasslands (or Prairie ecozone) are the temperate grassland region covering southern Saskatchewan, southern Alberta, southern Manitoba, and small portions of southwestern Ontario and the Peace River country of British Columbia. The grasslands cover about 465,000 square kilometres in their original extent, of which about 50 to 70 per cent has been converted to agriculture. The remaining native grassland is concentrated in the Saskatchewan and Alberta hills, mountain foothills, and areas too dry, rocky, or steep for crops.

The Canadian grasslands have three sub-ecoregions. The Tall-Grass Prairie of southeastern Manitoba (mostly converted to agriculture) had the deepest soils and tallest grasses (big bluestem, switchgrass) reaching 2 metres tall. The Mixed-Grass Prairie of southwestern Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan, and east-central Alberta is the largest sub-region, with grasses (porcupine grass, blue grama, plains rough fescue, June grass) reaching 30 to 60 centimetres. The Short-Grass Prairie of the Palliser Triangle in southwestern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta has the driest climate (350 millimetres or less per year) and shortest grasses (blue grama, June grass, needle and thread grass).

Grasslands National Park, established in 1981 and expanded in stages since, protects about 906 square kilometres of mixed-grass prairie in the West Block and East Block on the Saskatchewan-Montana border. The park is one of Canada's least-visited national parks (about 20,000 visitors per year) but is one of the most ecologically important. The park supports the only remaining black-tailed prairie dog colonies in Canada, swift fox (reintroduced in the 1980s after being extirpated in 1938), burrowing owl, ferruginous hawk, long-billed curlew, plains bison (reintroduced in 2005), pronghorn antelope, and the only population of the endangered greater sage-grouse east of the Rockies.

The Canadian grasslands are the homeland of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Aamskapi-pikuni), the Cree, the Saulteaux, the Assiniboine, the Stoney Nakoda, the Tsuut'ina, the Siksika, and the Metis Nation. The Plains Bison was central to Indigenous economies and spiritual life, with an estimated 30 to 60 million bison roaming the continental Great Plains in 1800. By 1885 the bison had been reduced to fewer than 1,000 in North America through commercial hunting, with consequences for Indigenous peoples that included starvation and displacement onto reserves. The Canadian Plains bison population today is about 30,000, mostly in conservation and commercial herds. Treaty 4 (1874), Treaty 6 (1876), and Treaty 7 (1877) cover most of the Canadian grasslands.