The Humid Pampas is a temperate grassland ecoregion of the Neotropic realm spread across the fertile plains of eastern Argentina, covering Buenos Aires Province almost entirely along with parts of Santa Fe, Córdoba, and La Pampa provinces. Its natural cover is medium-height perennial and annual grassland on rich mollisol soils, dominated by genera such as Stipa, Piptochaetium, Aristida, Melica, Briza, Bromus, Eragrostis, and Poa, with shrubs like Baccharis and Eupatorium and scattered woodland groves (montes) of algarrobos, talas, and chañares near the rivers. The climate is temperate and largely humid subtropical to oceanic, with around 900 mm of rain a year, hot summers, and occasional winter frost. It ranks among the most heavily settled and farmed parts of Argentina, so extensive conversion to cropland and cattle grazing has left little of the original grassland intact; the pampas fox serves as its flagship species. For gardeners, several of its native bunchgrasses, including Stipa, Briza, and Poa, belong to genera grown as ornamental grasses.
About the temperate grasslands, savannas & shrublands biome
Temperate prairies, steppes, and pampas of grasses and forbs with few trees, under continental climates of hot summers and cold winters. Their deep, fertile soils have made them among the most extensively converted biomes for agriculture.
Collections for this ecoregion
No curated collection's plants all fit this ecoregion's zone range. We surface a collection only when every member would grow here — partial fits get filtered out rather than mislead. As the catalog and the curated set both grow, this section will fill in.