What is a prairie?

If you’ve ever read Little House on the Prairie, chances are your first image of a prairie is the one painted by Laura Ingalls Wilder who describes “the enormous, empty prairie,” stretching beneath an endless blue sky, where grasses ripple like waves and the horizon seems to go on forever. Her prairie stretches north from the American Midwest into southern Manitoba, where the same sweeping grasslands continue unassumingly across an international border.