America's Northern Plains
An Overview and Assessment of Natural Resources
Basic Region Land Resources
The Northern Plains region consists of roughly 420 million acres, distributed across 55 Major Land Resource Areas (MLRAs). The MLRAs are geographic areas characterized by a particular pattern of soils, climate, land use/land cover, water resources, topography, and potential natural vegetation (Figure 1).
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Diversity
The soil resource base is a good indicator of regional land resource diversity, which is considerable in this region. Together, more than 4,427 soil series and 48,165 soil map units represent the Northern Plains landscape (Waltman, 1995).
Climate regimes range from arid to humid, and soil temperature regimes extend from warm temperate to tundra and permafrost. Precipitation ranges from less than 6 inches (142mm) in the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming to 44 inches (1,110mm) in southeastern Kansas.
Topography ranges from elevations of 14,433 feet (4,500m) on Mt. Elbert, Colorado, to under 800 feet (213m) in Kansas. Elevation is below 4,920 feet (1500m) for over 70% of the region, and only 4% of the land area is higher than 9,000 feet (2,743m).
National Significance
USGS's Land Use and Land Cover Digital Data (1986) indicates that the Northern Plains region contains a significant proportion of the nation's basic resources. Although the region includes only 15% of the conterminous U.S., it contains:
- 27% of the nation's cropland and pastures
- 66% of the tundra and snowfields of the lower 48 states (These are areas of sensitive ecosystems and also significant sources of snowmelt water for the Missouri, Platte, Colorado, and Arkansas Rivers.)
- nearly 33% of the nation's total rangeland
- 17% of the nation's total farm and ranch production (crop and livestock)
- almost 21% of U.S. livestock production.
The region's nearly 280,000 farms and ranches total 13% of the nation's farms, but they manage 28% of the U.S. farmland area. Less than 1% of the region is urban land, but this urban area makes up 5% of the nation's total urban land.
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