Although many atypical grasslands of the Southeast may not look "prairie-like" or "savanna-like" one thing that connects them is the presence of sun-loving herbaceous species, many of which often grow in typical grasslands.

This blog post is dedicated to the Highland Rim Limestone Riverscour Glade. This community is a type of glade, which is a rocky grassland/shrubland community that is found along just a few rivers in the Interior Plateaus ecoregion of central and east-central portions of Tennessee and Kentucky, southern Indiana, southern Ohio (?), and historically northern Alabama. 

Most natural grasslands of the world are maintained by fire, grazing or climatic factors (e.g. lack of rainfall, persistent cold/freezing in tundra), but in the depths of some of the deepest river gorges of Southern Appalachia are poorly known flood-maintained grasslands known to community ecologists as riverscours.

Glades don’t burn? In Arkansas, we are managing glade complexes with prescribed fire. There should be grassy savanna and open woodland around the edges of glades rather than an abrupt wall of redcedar and impenetrable shrub thickets.

The Blue Ridge Montane Basins Shortleaf Pine-Post Oak Savanna (found in portions of southwestern North Carolina near Hayesville, northern Georgia, and extreme southeastern Tennessee) is extremely poorly known. One of the earliest (1818) references to vegetation from this region recorded shortleaf pine and post oak. A high incidence of shortleaf pine and post oak would suggest adaptation to fire.