Country

Uruguay: one ecoregion. Each with its climate now and toward 2050, and its conservation tier.

One ecoregion covers Uruguay: the Uruguayan savanna, a Neotropic grassland system ranked Nature Could Recover, formally classed among the tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas and shrublands. In practice this is the campo - rolling open grassland with gallery forest along the rivers, under a mild, humid climate with rain through the year, warm summers, and cool winters that bring frost but rarely hard freezes. Grass, not forest, is the natural default, which makes Uruguay unusual among well-watered countries: trees historically kept to watercourses and sheltered ground. For gardeners that means a generous, temperate-to-subtropical growing climate with few hard limits, where wind exposure on open ground and summer dry spells matter more than cold, and the native grassland flora offers a deep palette of grasses and river-margin trees.