Konza Prairie

Flint Hills, Kansas, United States

Tallgrass prairie that was never ploughed, because the rock underneath made it impossible — the control group for a whole continent.

The ground under

Konza Prairie, Flint Hills

39.1058, -96.6094 · keep going ↓

Core sample

0–100 cm

39.1058, -96.6094

0 cmSurface

Konza Prairie, Flint Hills

Everything below this line is measured, not described.

8,165 plant records logged within about eight kilometres.

5 cmTopsoil

34.6g/kg

grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil

The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.

30 cmThe stock

66t/haModerate

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

The ordinary range for productive farmland and managed gardens in temperate Europe.

ISRIC — World Soil Information

Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.

deeperThe network

2,099 fungal records near here

Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.

Reading this figure

Read this against Guymon, four hundred kilometres south-west, where the same kind of grassland was ploughed out in the 1920s. That comparison shows up in the figures rather than only in the history, which is the whole reason both places are on this site.

Why this ground

Ground built by grass

Deep-rooted grassland puts carbon down rather than up. The richest agricultural soils on Earth were made this way, over thousands of years, and can be spent in a century.

The Flint Hills kept their prairie for an unromantic reason: shallow limestone made the ground unploughable, so it was grazed instead of cropped. Almost everywhere else the tallgrass prairie went under, and around four per cent of it remains.

Prairie grasses put most of their mass below ground. Roots reach metres down, die back, and are replaced, feeding carbon into the soil year after year. That process is what built the deep dark soils of the American Midwest before any of it was farmed.

Konza is a long-term ecological research site, which means the ground here has been measured continuously for decades. If you want to know what a soil looks like when nothing has been taken out of it, this is the closest thing North America has to an answer.

Read this against

Or measure somewhere else