There are many reasons we don’t want to lose prairie remnants to woody encroachment or conversion to agriculture. One of them is because we don’t want the Carbon in the soil to go to the atmosphere. Here’s a nice visual derived from IPCC data, 2022.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/sp/visualizing-carbon-storage-in-earths-ecosystems/
Compare temperate grasslands to temperate forests and croplands. How does a buckthorn thicket compare to any of these?
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