Canadian Prairies

The Canadian Prairies are a region of Western Canada made up of the three prairie provinces, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, covering about 1,960,681 square kilometers of grasslands, plains, and lowlands concentrated in the southern part of the region. The area corresponds closely to the Interior Plains, and its ecological and physical characteristics extend into northeastern British Columbia even though that province is excluded from the political definition of the term. Further north the land is more sparsely populated and dominated by forest with varied terrain. Ecologically the prairies form a temperate grassland and shrubland biome, including northern mixed grasslands across the three provinces and northern short grasslands in southeastern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan, with the prairie landscape beginning north of Edmonton and running south through all three provinces to the Manitoba-Minnesota border.