A study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), focused on an intensive grassland-sunflower system in southwest France in order to quantify the ecological ...

And grasslands are surprisingly good at pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. A single sunflower might not be the carbon hog that an oak tree is, ...

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: Millions of acres of grassland used to spread across the high plains in this country. There's still some left, but also seas of corn and wheat growing instead.

Southern grassland ecosystems, and nearly all the plants and animals they supported, are gone. There is hope of bringing some of them back to life.

Study region and experimental setup. Twenty-one pairs of grassland (green) and sunflower (yellow) fields were selected across the study region in Southwest France. Study landscapes (500 m radius ...