Lecture situates Missoula’s intermountain prairie within North American grassland types

Rick Holloway, a researcher in the University of Montana Division of Biological Sciences, used a public lecture in Missoula to place Mount Jumbo and Sentinel’s native grasslands into a continental and global context and to review the ecological traits that help grasses thrive in those systems.

Holloway opened by noting that grasslands are one of the principal biomes globally and that North American grasslands range from California annual grasslands to tallgrass prairie in the Midwest and shortgrass steppe toward the Rocky Mountains. He said the intermountain prairie around Missoula is often classified with or compared to the Palouse prairie but that the local intermountain grassland is an important, relatively well-preserved fragment of native bunchgrass…