Forgotten Savannas: What happened to the pre-Colonial Grasslands?

Disease, war, and campaigns of displacement and erasure brought by early European settlers and generations thereafter displaced and diminished Indigenous People. As a result of a fragmented societal structure and decrease in population, prior practices of biodiversity stewardship and agricultural land management diminished, including intentional and incidental fires. The frequency and sizes of fires present on the land in the Piedmont region decreased significantly since a large portion of them are hypothesized to be human-generated in the pre-Colonial landscape. Without Indigenous fires, ecological systems began to diminish as well. Not having that primary natural disturbance regime those systems and plants dependent upon fire also declined. Long-standing systemic functional pathways began to fall apart in these grassland systems, as fire played an important role in shaping the morphology and life history of the plants in those systems. The plants that are natural in grasslands emerged in concert with fire over millennia.

With the reduced frequency and geographic cover of fire having a huge impact on the decline of grasslands, a second force was on the horizon – Modern Agriculture. The open spaces during the period of European invasion (settlement) were often the easiest to cultivate because they had very few trees. The extensive and varied old savannas, patch-prairies, and the remnant Indigenous cultivation spaces were the very first to be appropriated for large-scale agricultural production. The ancient grasslands, due to having fewer trees, were plowed under first. At the same time, the natural vegetation of the region was being replaced by exotic species from other continents (domesticated crops and accidentally introduced non-native weeds).

Fire had been greatly diminished and open grasslands were being destroyed by a rapidly growing European agricultural empire. In addition to fire suppression and the direct destruction of ecosystems in open spaces, another critical element for the survival and health of grasslands was removed – grazing herbivores.Hundreds of thousands of large grassland-adapted grazing herbivores were removed and killed. The grassland-endemic species, such as bison and elk, were harvested and forced off the land, along with fire, and so the ecosystems they supported did not stand a chance. Today we find small, fragmented remnants of the pre-colonial grasslands, but collectively they probably constitute less than 1% of their former range and size.

A natural plant community cannot be fully healthy, regenerative, and persistent without the regulatory natural disturbance regimes that ushered it into existence and honed the characteristics of all its plants and animals.

Fire is perhaps the most important natural disturbance regime for Piedmont ecosystems, so much so that the ecosystems that evolved within the context of periodic fire became dependent upon it for survival. Further fire suppression and prevention in the 20th-21st centuries continues to contribute to the decline and loss of most of the fire-dependent ecosystems of the Piedmont. As a result an incredible amount of biodiversity has been suppressed, lost, or pressed into dormancy.