Savannas are found on every continent except Antarctica, concentrated in tropical and subtropical regions between roughly 15° and 30° latitude on both sides of the equator. Africa holds the largest share by far, with savanna covering about half the continent’s surface, but major savanna ecosystems also stretch across South America, Australia, India, and parts of Southeast Asia. Smaller, fragmented savannas exist in North America as well.
Africa: The World’s Largest Savanna Region
When most people picture a savanna, they’re thinking of Africa. The continent’s savanna belt runs from West Africa through East Africa and down into southern Africa, spanning more than two dozen countries: Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Botswana, and South Africa.
Within that enormous range, the character of the landscape varies dramatically. The Serengeti Plains in Tanzania and Kenya sit on nutrient-rich volcanic soils and support the famous wildebeest migration. The Sahel, along the southern edge of the Sahara, is drier and sparser, grading into semi-desert. Southern African savannas in Botswana and Zimbabwe tend to have more scattered trees and support large populations of elephants, lions, and antelope. What unites all of these regions is the same basic structure: a grassland with widely spaced trees, shaped by seasonal rainfall and periodic fire.
South America: Cerrado and Llanos
South America’s savannas cover a combined area slightly larger than 2 million square kilometers. The largest is the Cerrado, a vast plateau of scrublands and open woodlands in central Brazil. The Cerrado is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, home to roughly 5% of all known plant and animal species. Despite that, it receives less conservation attention than the Amazon rainforest to its north.
Further north, the Llanos spread across Venezuela and Colombia as flat, seasonally flooded grasslands along the Orinoco River basin. Bolivia has its own version, the Llanos de Mojos, and Brazil’s Gran Pantanal region includes large stretches of seasonally flooded savanna. Smaller savanna patches, called campos, appear in the Amazon basin and along the coastal areas of Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. These South American savannas share the wet/dry seasonal cycle that defines the biome globally, but their flooding patterns set them apart from their African counterparts.
Australia’s Tropical North
Australia’s savannas occupy a wide arc across the northern third of the continent, stretching from the Kimberley region in Western Australia through the Northern Territory and into Queensland. This belt includes Cape York Peninsula, the Einasleigh Uplands, and parts of the Brigalow Belt. Eucalyptus trees replace the acacias typical of African savannas, and the grass layer is dominated by species adapted to fire and long dry seasons. The Australian tropical savanna is one of the least densely populated savanna regions in the world, which has helped preserve large tracts of relatively intact habitat.
India and Southeast Asia
Savannas in India and Southeast Asia have historically been underrecognized. For decades, many of these landscapes were misclassified as degraded forest rather than acknowledged as distinct, ancient ecosystems. Recent evidence from fossil pollen records and discoveries of species found nowhere else suggests that large parts of India have been savanna for thousands of years, not recently cleared woodland.
Indian savannas tend to appear in drought-prone areas with moderate tree cover, roughly 40% canopy or less. In wetter zones, savannas and forests can exist side by side in mosaic patterns, with fire and grazing by domestic livestock helping to maintain the open grassland state. Similar patterns appear across Southeast Asia, where patches of savanna and grassland sit alongside denser forest, particularly in drier inland areas.
North America’s Fragmented Savannas
North America doesn’t have the vast tropical savannas found on other continents, but it does have temperate savanna ecosystems. Oak and pine savannas once covered significant portions of the Great Lakes region and the central United States. Today, most of these have been fragmented by agriculture and fire suppression. In Michigan, for example, oak-pine barrens survive on sandy, nutrient-poor soils in the northern Lower and Upper Peninsulas, though they’re often degraded. The decline of these Midwestern savannas has contributed to sharp drops in insect and bird populations that depend on open, grassy habitats with scattered trees.
What Makes a Savanna a Savanna
Savannas sit in a climate zone between rainforests and deserts. They typically receive between 50 and 150 centimeters (20 to 59 inches) of rain per year, almost all of it concentrated in a wet season lasting several months. The dry season that follows is what prevents dense forest from taking over. Trees can establish, but they remain widely spaced because drought, fire, and grazing keep the canopy open.
As rainfall increases, savannas tend to have more trees. But the relationship isn’t straightforward. Soil drainage, terrain, fire frequency, and the presence of large herbivores all play roles. Research on basalt-derived soils in African forest-savanna mosaics found that nutrient levels in the soil were more than sufficient to support dense forest, suggesting that fire, not poor soil, is often the key factor keeping savannas open. Frequent burning depletes nutrients in the top layers of soil, slowing tree growth and reinforcing the grassland state.
How Savannas Are Shifting
Savanna boundaries are not fixed. Rising carbon dioxide levels and changing rainfall patterns are reshaping these landscapes in complex ways. Across Africa, about 37% of observed vegetation changes in savannas and grasslands have been linked to human-caused climate change and increased atmospheric CO2. One major trend is woody encroachment: shrubs and trees spreading into open grasslands, converting savanna into denser woodland. This is happening across tropical savannas worldwide, driven by the interaction of land use, climate shifts, and the fertilizing effect of higher CO2 on woody plants.
At the same time, some savanna grasses are expanding into drier territory. In the Sahel and parts of southern Africa, increased rainfall is boosting grass production and pushing grasslands into areas that were previously semi-desert. On the wetter end of the spectrum, tropical forests are creeping into savannas along the edges of central Africa’s rainforest belt. The result is a biome in motion, with its borders shifting in both directions depending on local conditions.