A Backyard in Shambles
How Albertans are taking the natural world for granted
By Matt DeMille and Taylor Holmes
Across the globe, endangered ecosystems and the loss of biodiversity are commonplace. Spanning from pole to pole, and from continent to continent, the state of the world’s wild areas is bleak and is headed in the wrong direction.
The temperate grasslands region, which is a large stretch of flat land that primarily consists of grassy vegetation, found in parts of southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and as far south as southeastern United States, is one of those threatened ecosystems.
In 2016, Nature Conservancy Canada (NCC) stated that the grasslands region, including the Northern Great Plains, was one of the most threatened ecosystems in the world, losing more surface area than the Amazon rainforest.
The grasslands region is just one of several ecosystems the Alberta Wilderness Association strives to protect.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt DeMille
Despite sounding cockamamie at first read, conservationists involved with the ecosystem are backing the claim up.
At the conclusion of 2022, the World Wildlife Fund released their annual Plowprint Report, which examined the amount grasslands had been ‘plowed-up’ and converted throughout 2020. While the average amount of grasslands converted was less than the five-year average, 1.8 million acres of grasslands were still converted in 2020 alone.
In 2019, a pivotal paper published by Ken Rosenberg and colleagues found bird populations across the continent are declining, and found that species in the grasslands were hardest hit.
Birds are one of the most easily studied groups of animals, and have been reliably documented over decades. A decline in grassland birds is likely only the tip of the iceberg – losses in other groups such as amphibians, reptiles and rodents are simply harder to quantify.
Even seven years after NCC’s original report sounded the alarm, the state of the grasslands ecosystem remains dire.
​
Why are the grasslands endangered?
In the eyes of Ruiping Luo, a conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association (AWA), a lack of protection for the native grasslands plays a prominent role in its endangerment. This is further complicated by the fact that grasslands often have nutrient rich soil, and are thus prime agricultural land.
“We've already got so few grasslands remaining, and there's still encroachment in those regions. But also, the grasslands are very underrepresented in terms of protection. Maybe one per cent of the entire grasslands region is protected,” says Luo.
Perhaps the lack of awareness and protection for this region stems from its ability to go unnoticed compared to more renowned regions. Unlike the cinematic views of the Rocky Mountains or the lush greenscapes of the Boreal Forest, the untrained eye may see the Great Plains and grasslands as barren, even lifeless.
This, in turn, gives sectors, like agriculture, helium, and oil and gas, a sense of justification in replacing Alberta’s native ecosystems with their own infrastructure. For those looking to expand society’s footprint, the grasslands are their blank canvas waiting to be filled in.
“Part of that is because so much of the agriculture and so many of the people live in what's Alberta's grasslands. But because of this lack of protection, a lot of the native grasslands remaining are still being converted and they're still undergoing exploration from oil and gas or from helium,” says Luo.
“We're still losing grasslands and we're already at the point where there's barely anything left.”
Life in the grasslands
At first glance, the prairies may look like a flat, dull plain that stretches past the horizon but the region is not desolate and devoid of life. It’s very much alive.
Luo, who has been working for the AWA for one and a half years, explains that the ecosystem is much more vibrant than an empty field used for agriculture and human expansion.
“If you look closely, there's a lot of different plants just within these patches of native grassland. There's a lot of different insects and reptiles, mammals going through them. And I think a lot of people miss that about the grasslands, that they contain just as much biodiversity and perhaps more than some other places like forests or mountains.”
It’s important to look at grasslands beyond the scope of modern political borders – which have existed for only a few centuries (and not-even in their current form).
While the various regions that contain chunks of grassland ecosystems are separated by thousands of kilometers and vary in terms of flora and fauna, the North American grasslands are naturally more of an interconnected web of ecosystems that flow into one another than disconnected ecosystems. Furthermore, many “grassland” species are migratory or have ranges that extend into multiple habitats, including a holistic view of conservation that looks beyond intra and international borders is vital.
Kyle Lybarger is a forester and conservationist from Alabama. Lybarger runs a TikTok account with over 400,000 followers (@nativeplanttok) where he shares his knowledge and passion of the grasslands conservation with a global audience. In a single patch of naturalized yard at his house, Lybarger is amazed year-round at the array of life his little patch of grassland contains.
“The first year, it was an immediate response from wildlife and insects. It's constantly just alive,” explains Lybarger. “That little portion of my yard, there's constantly insects and butterflies and bees and… all the gold finches are in there eating all the seeds from those wildflowers.”
An American goldfinch resting at a feeder.
PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Holmes
The roles of the grasslands
Biodiversity, in this context, is the variety of life (animals, plants, fungi, protists) in an ecosystem. A rich array of life leads to healthy ecosystems, but when ecosystems are destroyed or fragmented, they can no longer support the variety of life which sustains it.
The state of biodiversity in an ecosystem is crucial in many regards including maintaining balanced populations, preventing natural disasters, improving agricultural productivity, sequestering carbon emissions among other things.
“[The grassland] increases fertile soils, increases production of soils. It helps to filter water and air, it can help with buffering against natural disasters, things like floods [and] drought, and it can help to control pests and diseases,” says Luo.
Across the prairies native plants that have made their home in the ecosystem help prevent flooding by securing soil in place and absorbing large volumes of water. By removing more and more of this wild area our communities are left without the natural defenses they never knew they had.
“If you're losing a lot of that system, then there’s less of a capture system to prevent all of the water entering the river and potentially overwhelming cities, roads, or anything in the way,” says Luo.
Not only can grasslands help prevent flooding, but they play a pivotal role in preventing droughts too. The water absorbed by grasslands is then held in the watershed as groundwater, storing a steady supply of water which keeps communities well-watered with fewer floods.
​
Additionally, the North American grassland ecosystem has produced some of the most agriculturally productive land in the world. Different plants have different nutrient requirements, and provide different nutrients into the soil – the three most important nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
Nitrogen fixing plants, like clover or buffalo bean, help put nitrogen back into the soil, enriching the soil. Manure from bison and cattle and guano from birds are also fantastic fertilizers, enriching the soil without the need for synthesized fertilizers.
Buffalo bean is a common plant native to Alberta that “fixes” nitrogen into the soil, which helps improve fertility of the soil.
PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Holmes
The natural diversity of the grasslands stands in sharp contrast to the monocultures of modern agriculture. Instead of a mix of plants each balancing nutrients in the soil, large swaths of only a single cultivar create imbalance and inevitably deplete soil nutrients.
“For farming these native grasses: you're using less fertilizer, you're using less water. Your cattle can gain more weight on an acre of native grasses compared to non-native grasses. And so there's a lot of possibilities for savings there,” says Lybarger.
Biodiversity is also vital for the management of pest and invasive species. Modernity has brought with it homogeneity in botany. Crops of wheat or canola for acres upon acres and lawns filled with the same few non-native plants and grasses leave ecological gaps, which are exploited by pests.
When there is a variety of species, like in a natural grassland, there is more competition for resources, which makes it harder for any one species to gain the upperhand and overtake the ecosystem. Insectivorous insects, birds and bats provide the equivalent of billions of dollars worth of pest control services across the continent, but they depend on native habitat and plants.
Lybarger also emphasizes the importance of grasslands in carbon sequestration – capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere. Not only are they more efficient at removing carbon from the atmosphere than temperate forests, grasslands are also far more resilient and reliable than trees long-term.
“When you have a wildfire run through a forest that kills all these trees, you're automatically releasing a ton of carbon because those trees weren't storing most of their carbon underground like grasslands are,” says Lybarger.
Most of the carbon that is taken out of the atmosphere by trees is stored in the trees themselves (primarily the trunk). When the trees burn the carbon is released. Whereas in grasslands, the carbon is stored underground, so the carbon remains sequestered while the foliage above burns. Furthermore, controlled burns add nutrients to the soil and allow for greater diversity to develop in the region.
While there are countless benefits that stem from the grasslands, its biodiversity can plummet with ease.
However, much like a jenga tower, as pieces of the ecosystem are removed, the whole becomes weaker. If too many pieces are removed, the ecosystem crashes – and with it all of the benefits it provides.
If this is to be the case, Luo believes organizations will look to replicate the services the grasslands once provided us in an artificial manner.
“If we don’t have these organisms,” said Luo, “then we would have to find a way to do it ourselves mechanically, for instance. And that’s going to cost a lot to build those kinds of machines to keep them going in order to provide these services that normally, organisms that might have lived in the native prairie that they would’ve provided.”
Lybarger agrees, noting that humans have had to take on the role of large herbivores, primarily the bison, in prairie ecosystems. The extensive dependance on synthetic fertilizers in the agricultural industry is another example showing that humans are having to manage and bear the costs of biodiversity lost.
While efforts like decommissioning old oil wells and reseeding soil have already been made to revitalize the grasslands that have already been stripped, the process takes too much time.
A pumpjack on private land in the prairies near Longview, Alta.
PHOTO CREDIT: Taylor Holmes
In their 2021-22 annual report, the Orphan Well Association, an organization that targets out-of-commission oil and gas infrastructure in Alberta, states that the time it takes to close one site can take years. While the decommissioning portion of the project only takes two weeks to complete, re-vegetation of the land takes about two years.
“It's usually much easier to destroy native grassland than it is to regain it,” says Luo.
“You can’t expect to have this area, that's been completely converted, back as native prairie, as biodiverse as what we've lost in five or 10 years. The native prairie that we have has formed over hundreds of years, and especially if you're losing some of that soil, that could take centuries to regain to the extent that we had.”
As a conservation specialist with the Alberta Wilderness Association, Ruiping Luo hopes to protect the remaining wild areas in the province by maintaining a healthy information flow with their audience.
PHOTO CREDIT: Matt DeMille
While it may take a long time for grasslands to reach their natural state, the time it takes for a grassland to recover is still far shorter than forests, which makes grassland conservation vital in immediately addressing many climate concerns including flooding, droughts and carbon mitigation.
Instead of building up what’s already been lost, Luo believes that protecting the remaining grasslands area should be a priority.
“We want a lot to try and protect the remaining areas of wild spaces, those natural or native habitats for a lot of different species. And we want to try and protect as much as possible these species and their ranges so that we’re maintaining the species as they are and as many of them as possible.”
Lybarger educates and advocates for grassland protection, conservation and sustainable management through his TikTok account.
“I started making videos on TikTok and stuff… because there's nobody's talking about this stuff,” says Lybarger, “In order to save these places, people need to learn about them, and that seems to be the theme across a lot of these ecological problems is people just don't even know about these ecosystems. So how can they care about saving something that they don't even know exists?”
