Dangerous flooding ongoing in Texas, with flash flood risks across the region

(NEW YORK) — America has lost about half of one of its most prominent and iconic landscapes, and protecting what’s left is key to ensuring healthy ecosystems and biodiversity in the future, experts told ABC News.

The continental U.S. has lost about half of its historic grasslands prior to European settlement, according to a press release from America’s Grasslands Coalition, a network of conservation organizations, researchers and government agencies that aims to restore North America’s native prairie and grassland ecosystems. An estimated 98% of native tall grass prairies has been eradicated, Ryan Sensenig, a grassland ecologist at the University of Notre Dame, told ABC News.

While grasslands are typically associated with the Great Plains, they used to exist in nearly every region of the U.S., Dwayne Estes, co-founder and executive director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute told ABC News.

Grasslands were common everywhere from the Atlantic coastlines to the Mississippi River and into the Rocky Mountains and the West Coast,  according to experts. Regions that are not typically associated with grasslands, including New York, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, were covered in them, Estes said.

They are part of the very fabric of North America’s natural heritage, “from sea to shining sea,” Patrick Keyser, director of Tennessee’s Center for Native Grasslands, told ABC News.

Grasslands continue to be threatened, experts say

Today, grasslands continue to disappear at an “alarming rate,” the coalition said.

Invasive plant species have infiltrated many of the natural grasslands, said David Wedin, director of the University of Nebraska’s Center for Grassland Studies. And most recently, development of housing, shopping malls and interstate highways — and now data centers — are popping up in areas that would have been grasslands, Keyser said.

Currently, grasslands cover about 1 million square miles in the continental U.S., according to America’s Grasslands Coalition. This includes savannahs and shrublands.

The most prominent pockets of native grasslands that still exist today are in the Flint Hills of Kansas, which contains about 4.5 million acres of grasslands, and the Nebraska Sandhills, which has about 12 million acres of grasslands.

The area of Nebraska is still an intact grassland. Much of the land is privately owned cattle ranches, but there is still a lot of native grassland and species left there, Wedin said.

Central Montana also contains scattered patches of native grasslands, Keyser said.

There are more than 1,000 native grasses that have been documented in the U.S. The two species of dominant native grasslands in the U.S. include the big bluestem, a robust grass that can grow to 10 feet tall and make for “excellent” cattle forage, and the little blue stem, a much smaller plant that is common on sandier, drier soils, Keyser said.

When US grasslands began to vanish

Indigenous communities relied on grasslands to survive, Sensenig said. They would practice prescribed burning to maintain the grasslands and enhance its biodiversity, Sensenig said. Native Americans would use the plant species for basket-weaving and currency and feed on the grazers, such as bison, elk and deer, Sensenig added.

“Eastern Massachusetts was historically dominated by grasslands before European settlement, and in that area people used to eat these things called prairie chickens regularly,” Keyser said, adding that prairie chickens require extensive grassland for their habitat.

Other evidence of grasslands on the East Coast includes thousands of insect and plant species that are tied to grasslands that still exist in the region, Estes said.

Grasslands east of the Mississippi River have been gone for “a very long time,” Estes said.

As early as the 1690s, grasslands began to disappear from places like Philadelphia and Baltimore, even before the nation was founded, Estes said.

In the 1700s and 1800s, pioneers began to clear land where there were fewer trees to create their farms. They tended to prioritize semi-open areas, Keyser said.

“Eastern grasslands were lost so long ago that basically they’ve been erased from society’s collective memory,” Estes said. “They were lost before the camera was invented.”

Grasslands continued to be eradicated as settlers migrated West.

The Transcontinental Railroad later brought settlers into the Great Plains in the 1870s, and gasoline-powered tractors led to widespread plowing of the native grasslands in the region, Keyser said.

“So, consequently, what had been a grassland ecosystem became a cornfield,” Keyser said.

Why grasslands are so important

Grasslands play a vital role in supporting wildlife, storing carbon, sustaining food systems and maintaining ecosystem balance, according to America’s Grasslands Coalition.

Grasslands also store huge amounts of carbon, which helps to regulate the atmosphere, Sensenig said. It is important for soil conservation, water regulation and wildlife habitat, Wedin said.

Grasslands are thought to store 30% of the world’s soil-based carbon — and 80% of that carbon is beneath the ground in the soil, Sensenig said.

Keystone herbivore species such as the American bison, elk and mule deer live in grasslands and help to regulate the rich plant biota for other creatures to thrive, Keyser said. Birds, pollinators and smaller mammals, such as prairie dogs, also depend on the open, grassy ecosystem and assist in maintaining the biodiversity, Estes said.

Grassland ecologists are concerned about the gradual degradation of grasslands due to lack of management and climate change and other changes to the environment, such as intensive modern agriculture, Wedin said.

“These sorts of chronic, low-level threats have a cumulative impact on our grasslands,” Wedin said.

Nearly half of 2,014 Americans surveyed are unfamiliar with grasslands, according to findings released Wednesday by America’s Grasslands Coalition.

Increasing appreciation and awareness of America’s grasslands is key to accelerating conservation action, according to the coalition.

The upcoming 250th birthday of America is an integral time to raise awareness of the importance of grasslands, Ginette Hemley, senior vice president of wildlife conservation at the World Wildlife Fund, said in a statement.

“As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, this is a moment to recognize the landscapes that have shaped the nation,” Hemley said. “From iconic species like bison to the communities that depend on them, grasslands are part of that heritage — and protecting them is part of our shared future.”

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(MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Tenn.) — The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating a crash involving a school bus in Tennessee that killed two middle school students.

The NTSB said it has “initiated a safety investigation in coordination with the Tennessee Highway Patrol” into Friday’s deadly crash in Carroll County.

“The NTSB investigation will examine school bus driver performance, student passenger occupant protection, and the oversight of school transportation operations,” the agency said in a statement on Monday.

The investigation can take one to two years to complete, with a preliminary report possible in about 30 days, the NTSB said.

The crash involved a school bus from Montgomery County, a Tennessee Department of Transportation dump truck and a Chevrolet Trailblazer, authorities said. Dash cam video showed the bus initially colliding with the dump truck.

“The details of the crash are still ongoing,” Tennessee Highway Patrol Maj. Travis Plotzer said at a press briefing on Friday, adding that it doesn’t appear the dump truck “had any contributing factors to the crash.”

Two students on the school bus were pronounced dead at the scene, the Tennessee Highway Patrol said. Authorities have not released any additional details on them.

Several others were injured in the crash, with multiple victims airlifted to trauma centers in Memphis and Nashville, authorities said.

The cause of the crash remains under investigation.

The Clarksville-Montgomery County School System said a group of eighth grade students and educators from Kenwood Middle School were on the bus headed to Jackson, Tennessee, for a weekend competition when the crash occurred.

“In a moment, their lives and their families’ lives were upended,” Clarksville-Montgomery County School System Director Jean Luna-Vedder said in a message to the school community over the weekend. “As a mother and a lifelong educator, I cannot begin to imagine the fear and pain they continue to endure. I ask that everyone pray and wrap their arms around these students, employees, their families, and the entire Kenwood community.”

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(SEATTLE)– The transgender University of Washington student who was killed in a student housing building suffered over 40 stab wounds to the head, neck, shoulder, arms and hands, according to the probable cause statement.

Juniper Blessing, 19, was found covered in blood in the laundry room of the Nordheim Court building on Sunday night, according to court documents.

The suspect, 31-year-old Christopher Leahy, surrendered to police on Wednesday and was booked for first-degree murder, documents said.

“Our family has been shattered,” Blessing’s family said in a statement released by the Human Rights Alliance. “Juniper was simply the most amazing human being we have ever known — highly intelligent, extremely talented, and deeply sensitive to the needs of others. Juniper’s loss not only devastates us but diminishes the world.”

“A gifted singer with a transcendent voice, Juniper was admitted to New Mexico School for the Arts, where they studied from 2020 until 2024,” the family said. “Weather was a love of Juniper’s since early childhood, and at the University of Washington they intended to study Atmospheric Science while continuing to study voice and pursuing minors in Music and Philosophy. They loved Seattle and Santa Fe, where they worked as an usher during summers at the Santa Fe Opera.”

“Juniper was courageously living their life as who they were until it was cut tragically short,” the family said.

According to court documents, another Nordeim Court resident told police that shortly before 10 p.m. Sunday, a man followed her when she used her card to access the building and laundry room.

She said the man told her he was waiting for his laundry. Surveillance video shows them in the laundry room and the suspect “appears to be visually searching the room for cameras,” court documents said, before he left the room.

A video from 10 p.m. shows Blessing in the laundry room, and the suspect “comes back into the laundry room and stares directly into the camera,” documents said.

The suspect “appears to follow the path of the cord with his eyes and head from the camera around the wall above the doorway,” documents said. “He then turns to exit the laundry room, something clatters to the ground and he pauses. He continues out of the laundry room at 10:00:27 p.m.”

“Blessing is seen cleaning the lint tray, appears to add more time to the dryer, then stands up and deposits the lint into the garbage at the end of the bank of dryers. … The video stops at 10:01:01 p.m.,” documents said.

Seattle police released the images of the suspect in the laundry room, documents said. A man named Patrick Leahy contacted police saying the suspect in the image was “without a doubt” his brother, Christopher Leahy, according to the documents, and a friend also reached out to police identifying Christopher Leahy as the man in the photo.

Christopher Leahy’s attorney called the Bellevue Police Department on Wednesday night to say he was turning himself in, documents said. Christopher Leahy came to the department with his parents and was taken into custody, the documents said.

Christopher Leahy made his first court appearance on Thursday and is due back in court on Monday, according to ABC Seattle affiliate KOMO. He has not entered a plea.

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