North American Plains

Great Plains
The Great Plains States
Region
View of the Great Plains near Lincoln, Nebraska
Country	United States  Canada
Coordinates	37°N 97°W / 37°N 97°W / 37; -97Coordinates: 37°N 97°W / 37°N 97°W / 37; -97
Length	3,200 km (1,988 mi)
Width	800 km (497 mi)
Area	1,300,000 km2 (501,933 sq mi)
Approximate extent of the Great Plains

The Great Plains (sometimes simply "the Plains") is the broad expanse of flat land (a plain), much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland, that lies west of the Mississippi River tallgrass prairie states and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. It embraces

and reaches into

The region is known for supporting extensive cattle ranching and dry farming.

The Canadian portion of the Plains is known as the Prairies. It covers much of Alberta and southern Saskatchewan, and a narrow band of southern Manitoba. Despite covering a relatively small geographic area, the Prairies are nevertheless home to the majority of each of the three provinces' respective populations.

The term "Great Plains" is used in the United States to describe a sub-section of the even more vast Interior Plains physiographic division, which covers much of the interior of North America. It also has currency as a region of human geography, referring to the Plains Indians or the Plains States.

In Canada the term is little used; Natural Resources Canada, the government department responsible for official mapping and equivalent to the United States Geological Survey, treats the Interior Plains as one unit consisting of several related plateaux and plains. There is no region referred to as the "Great Plains" in The Atlas of Canada. In terms of human geography, the term prairie is more commonly used in Canada, and the region is known as the Prairie Provinces or simply "the Prairies."

The North American Environmental Atlas, produced by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, a NAFTA agency composed of the geographical agencies of the Mexican, American, and Canadian governments, uses the "Great Plains" as an ecoregion synonymous with predominant prairies and grasslands rather than as physiographic region defined by topography. The Great Plains ecoregion includes five sub-regions: Temperate Prairies, West-Central Semi-Arid Prairies, South-Central Semi-Arid Prairies, Texas Louisiana Coastal Plains, and Tamaulipus-Texas Semi-Arid Plain, which overlap or expand upon other Great Plains designations.