Estimates suggest that less than 1 percent of these prairies remain today. According to Hill, about 356,000 acres of prairie were documented in the Black Belt in the 1830s. As a result of all the calcium, the soil is very fertile and good for growing crops.īefore farmers discovered the soil’s fertility, the Black Belt was primarily prairie. Over millions of years, plankton that lived in the Gulf left behind exoskeletons rich in calcium carbonate-the accumulation of which resulted in the Black Belt’s chalk subsoil. The fertile soil has origins in the Cretaceous Period, when the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico was much farther inland. Built from Landsat satellite images, the NLCD distinguishes between types of land cover (urban, forested, farmed, etc.). Indeed, cultivated land dominates the Black Belt as indicated by green areas in the map below, based on 2011 data from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD). “One visiting the Black Belt today would likely see lots of agricultural fields filled with corn, cotton, and soybeans, as well as cattle production.” “The open, relatively treeless nature of the Black Belt makes it stand out amongst the adjacent forested landscapes in Mississippi and Alabama,” said JoVonn Hill of Mississippi State University, who studies the biodiversity of grasslands in the southeastern United States. The technique makes it possible to strip away clouds and haze. The image is a “best-pixel mosaic,” which means it is composed of small parts of many images captured between 20. The crescent shape of the Black Belt shows up in a natural-color image (above) by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. The contrast between this cultivated land and the surrounding forested areas is so stark that it is visible from space. The region is known as the Black Belt Prairie, so named for its characteristically dark, fertile soil. Along a swath of land curving through Mississippi and Alabama, farms dominate the landscape.
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