Forest steppe

The forest steppe is a temperate-climate ecotone and habitat type in which grassland is interspersed with patches of woodland or forest. It is best known as a belt that runs across northern Eurasia, from the eastern lowlands of Europe through Russia to eastern Siberia, where it forms a transition between the temperate grasslands of the steppe to the south and the temperate broadleaf and mixed forests to the north. Similar zones occur in the mountains of the Iranian Plateau and, in North America, as the aspen parkland of the Prairie Provinces, North Dakota and Minnesota, which lies between the Great Plains grasslands and the northern taiga. Conservation ecologists treat many of these belts as separate transition ecoregions, among them the East European, Kazakh and Daurian forest steppes.