Distribution

Buffelgrass occurs in the southern United States from California to Florida (with the exception of Alabama, Georgia, and the panhandle of Florida) [3,37,48,82,83,128], with outlying populations in Oklahoma [128], Missouri, and New York [82,128]. It also occurs in Puerto Rico and Hawaii [82,128]. Grass Manual on the Web provides a distributional map of buffelgrass.

Buffelgrass is native to Africa, India, and western Asia [9,48,56,64,126]. It was introduced into Texas in the 1940s to stabilize overgrazed rangelands and provide livestock forage [10,64,91,135]. It was introduced into Arizona in the 1930s and 1940s to control erosion [17,18,24,124]. Buffelgrass also established in Arizona from seed dispersed from Sonora, Mexico (see Seed dispersal), where over 1,000,000 acres (400,000 ha) of native desert and thornscrub vegetation was converted to buffelgrass pasture [18,19,50]. Buffelgrass was first collected on the island of Hawaii in 1932 [133]. It was intentionally planted on Kaho'olawe Island, Hawaii in 1988 and 1990 [142]. The literature does not describe how buffelgrass arrived in other areas of the United States. Buffelgrass has also been introduced into Australia, where it is considered highly invasive [23,33,79].