ABSTRACT
North American grasslands are the product of a long interaction between people, land, and animals. While grasslands may form because of aridity, cold, or soil limitations, many have been created or expanded by human activity, most often by burning. Deliberately setting fires is a common part of the indigenous and traditional management portfolio in North America. It aims at reduction of trees and shrubs, manipulation of species composition, opening of areas for game, hunting, plant gathering, human habitation and diverse other purposes. The grazing of domestic livestock was not introduced to the continent until the 16th century and remained mostly a subsistence pastoralism until it became a widespread commercial activity in the 19th century. Instead, the grasslands found by Euroamerican colonists had already been shaped and sometimes created by the great hunting economies of native people and developed in the late Pleistocene as the last Ice Age drew to a close (Krech, 1999; Merchant, 2007).
