Summary
Grasses are beneficial to human society by creating habitat for bees, and other pollinators, that ensure crops produce fruit and seeds, improve the quality of water, trap carbon, and provide food for animals upon which people rely for nutrition. However, grasses are a large group of over 11,000 species, which cover ~50% of the earth’s surface, and there are differences in their ability to perform beneficial ecological functions. For example, they can differ in the time of year they grow (also called phenology), how fast they grow, and their ability to tolerate and survive droughts. Importantly
