South American grasslands look like empty land from above, but they are some of the planet’s most productive and carbon-rich ecosystems. This week’s video asks why they’re still being plowed, and what’s really at stake if we fail to recognize their hidden value.

South American grasslands look empty from above — but what if that’s because we don’t know how to measure their value?

When grasslands come up in conversation, they’re often described in terms of what they can be converted into: cropland, pasture, exports. From satellites, much of southern South America looks busy, fenced, grazed, developed. It’s easy to assume these landscapes are already fully used.

But in this week’s episode, we step back and ask a different question: what are grasslands already doing, right now, that we rarely account for?

South American grasslands didn’t evolve to be plowed. They evolved under grazing, fire, wind, and time. Instead of investing energy in tall trees or dense canopies, native grasses send their energy underground, building deep root systems that grow, die back, and regrow year after year. Each cycle adds organic carbon to the soil. Over decades and centuries, intact grasslands quietly accumulate value, not in a single harvest, but continuously.

That value only persists as long as the soil remains intact.

When grasslands are plowed, roots are severed, soils are oxygenated, and carbon that took centuries to store can be released in just years. Productivity doesn’t disappear, but it changes form becoming short-term and extractive instead of stable and regenerative.

To understand what’s still happening on the ground, we zoomed out to the South America grassland region, including the Pampas, the Campos of Uruguay and southern Brazil, and the Patagonian steppe. This is a landscape defined not by forests, but by open horizons, periodic fire, and some of the deepest, richest soils on the planet.

Before humans, these grasslands were shaped by large, mobile herbivore, including giant ground sloths and camel-like animals, whose movement and disturbance helped keep the system open and favored plants that grow downward rather than upward. Today, most of that grazing pressure comes from cattle, with native grazers persisting at lower densities. In places where soils remain unplowed, many of these grasslands are still functioning as grasslands.

Across the region, thousands of people are documenting plants and animals on iNaturalist, day by day, revealing where grasslands are still cycling carbon, supporting wildlife, and connecting migration routes across continents. Individually, each observation is small. Together, they show that these landscapes are still doing critical work.

iNaturalist users in the region have contributed some great photos!

And this iNaturalist project from the region caught our eye!

The Aves Atropelladas de Argentina (Bird Roadkill Project of Argentina) project has a goal to collect observations of birds killed as a result of vehicle collisions. Wildlife roadkill is a major threat to biodiversity conservation, and studying the issue may lead to conservation measures

In the video, we focus on three living systems: grasslands as powerful carbon stores, fire as a sustaining force rather than a failure, and open grasslands as migration corridors linking the Americas. None of these functions announce themselves loudly. All of them disappear quickly once the land is broken apart.

Plowing represents value taken all at once.
But carbon-rich soils, fire-maintained biodiversity, and migratory connections are creating value every single day . . . quietly and continuously.

We can grow food in many ways. We can change how markets work.
What we can’t easily replace are the systems beneath our feet once they’re gone.

So we’d love to hear from you: Do you think grasslands can, or should, be financially valued without being plowed? And which of these systems do you think matters most in the long run?

Join the conversation in the comments on YouTube and let us know how you see what’s really at stake here.

Thank you for being part of Naturalists’ World,

Scott

*This content uses publicly available data from iNaturalist. iNaturalist does not endorse or sponsor this newsletter.

**Some images in this newsletter were shared on iNaturalist under a CC0 (public domain) license. We thank the contributors who generously chose to place their observations and photos in the public domain, helping make global nature education and conservation possible. Individual photographers are not attributed out of respect for personal privacy.