Say goodbye to the grass. The scramble for biofuels is rapidly killing off unique grasslands and pastures in the central US.
Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly of South Dakota State University in Brookings analysed satellite images of five states in the western corn belt. They found that 530,000 hectares of grassland disappeared under blankets of maize and soya beans between 2006 and 2011. The rate was fastest in South Dakota and Iowa, with as much as 5 per cent of pasture becoming cropland each year.
The trend is being driven by rising demand for the crops, partly through incentives to use them as fuels instead of food.
The switch from meadows to crops is causing a crash in populations of ground-nesting birds. One of the US's most important breeding grounds for wildfowl, an area called the Prairie Pothole Region, is also at risk, with South Dakota's crop fields now within 100 metres of the wetlands. "Half of North American ducks breed here," says Wright.
Bill Henwood of the Temperate Grasslands Conservation Initiative in Vancouver, Canada, says the results are distressing. "Exchanging real environmental impacts for the dubious benefits of biofuels is counterproductive," he says. "Last year's record drought in the corn belt all but wiped out the crops anyway."
Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1215404110
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.
If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.
Biofuel rush is wiping out unique American grasslands
This article
Biofuel rush is wiping out unique American grasslands
can be opened in url
http://newsvailer.blogspot.com/2013/02/biofuel-rush-is-wiping-out-unique.html
Biofuel rush is wiping out unique American grasslands
