What type of landscape is the savanna

There is very little rain in the dry season. In the wet season vegetation grows, including lush green grasses and wooded areas. As you move further away from the equator and its heavy rainfall, the grassland becomes drier and drier - particularly in the dry season. Savanna vegetation includes scrub , grasses and occasional trees, which grow near water holes , seasonal rivers or aquifers.

Delicate Meadow Katydid. Gladston's Spur-throat Grasshopper. Grizzly Spur-throat Grasshopper. Mermiria Grasshopper. Scudder's Short-winged Grasshopper. Showy Grasshopper. Speckled Rangeland Grasshopper. Stone's Locust. Velvet-striped Grasshopper. A Leafhopper. Prairie Leafhopper. A Planthopper. An Issid Planthopper. Red-tailed Prairie Leafhopper. Yellow Loosestrife Leafhopper.

A Seed Bug. Big Brown Bat. Little Brown Bat. Prairie Deer Mouse. Eastern Pipistrelle. Franklin's Ground Squirrel. Northern Long-eared Bat.

Woodland Vole. Prairie Vole. Silver-haired Bat. Water Shrew. A Common Burrower Mayfly. A Flat-headed Mayfly. Fox Small Square-gilled Mayfly. Pecatonica River Mayfly. A Small Minnow Mayfly. Wisconsin Small Square-gilled Mayfly. A Brush-legged Mayfly.

A Mayfly. Winnebago Small Square-gilled Mayfly. Lined Snake. North American Racer. Blanding's Turtle. Gray Ratsnake. Plains Gartersnake. Timber Rattlesnake. Western Wormsnake. Arnoglossum plantagineum. Asclepias lanuginosa. Camassia scilloides. Cirsium hillii. Diarrhena obovata. Echinacea pallida. Lechea mucronata. Lespedeza leptostachya. Napaea dioica. Pediomelum esculentum. Thaspium trifoliatum var. Agalinis gattingeri.

Asclepias purpurascens. Baptisia tinctoria. Boechera dentata. Botrychium campestre. Carex laevivaginata. Chaerophyllum procumbens. Cuscuta coryli. Cuscuta polygonorum. Gymnocarpium robertianum. Hydrophyllum appendiculatum. Jeffersonia diphylla. Melica nitens. Nuphar advena. Paronychia canadensis. Prenanthes crepidinea. Scutellaria ovata ssp. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

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Luke Dollar, Conservation Scientist. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource. If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer.

If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. A food chain outlines who eats whom. A food web is all of the food chains in an ecosystem. Each organism in an ecosystem occupies a specific trophic level or position in the food chain or web. Producers, who make their own food using photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, make up the bottom of the trophic pyramid.

Primary consumers, mostly herbivores, exist at the next level, and secondary and tertiary consumers, omnivores and carnivores, follow. At the top of the system are the apex predators: animals who have no predators other than humans. Help your class explore food chains and webs with these resources. The pine savannas of Belize and Honduras , in Central America, occur on sandy soils.

Savannas as subclimaxes. Waterlogged conditions occur when the A-horizon of lateritic soils is exposed to the atmosphere. Alternating wet and dry seasons and baking by the sun create a brick-hard layer impermeable to water.

This usually red hardpan is called a laterite from the Latin for brick. During the rainy season, there is standing water above the hardpan for several months, preventing the establishment of most tree species. During the dry season, the laterite prevents penetration of roots, also inhibiting the growth of most trees. Several species of palms do tolerate these conditions and, along with grasses, occur above laterites.

Droughty substrates , such as quartz or volcanic sands, also inhibit the growth of most trees. The pine savannas of Central America are examples of savanna vegetation developed on droughty, low-nutrient conditions of quartz sands; the grass savanna of the Serengeti—with its herds of large mammals—is virtually treeless.

Low-nutrient soils. The cerrado of Brazil occupies a broad expanse of the Brazilian Highlands that, were it not for the low-nutrient level of the heavily-leached soils, would be occupied by a seasonal forest. Fire subclimaxes. Two groups of plants that are pre-adapted to survive fire become dominant in areas where burning is frequent and periodic.

Such fires have both natural and human origins. The savannas of South east Asia are generally considered to be man-made. Palms have the advantage of being monocots: their vascular bundles are scattered throughout the stem so that scorching of the outermost layer of the trunk will not kill the plant.

Dicot trees, on the other hand, have their vascular bundles arrnaged around the outer, living part of their stems where they may be easily destroyed by fire.