The Great Plains are a broad expanse of flat land, much of it covered in prairie, steppe and grassland, which lies west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains in the United States and Canada. This area covers parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The Canadian portion of the Plains is known as the Prairies. Some geographers include some territory of Mexico in the Plains, but many stop at the Rio Grande. The region is known for supporting extensive ranching and agriculture.

The term Great Plains is used in the United States to describe a sub-section of the even more vast Interior Plains physiographic division, which covers much of the interior of North America. It also has currency as a region of human geography, referring to the Plains Indians or the Plains States.

In Canada the term is little used; Natural Resources Canada, the government department responsible for official mapping and equivalent to the United States Geological Survey, treats the Interior Plains as one unit consisting of several related plateaux and plains. There is no region referred to as the "Great Plains" in The Atlas of Canada. In terms of human geography, the term prairie is more commonly used in Canada, and the region is known as the Prairie Provinces or simply "the Prairies."

Michael Forsberg is an American photographer. Many of his photographs depict landscapes and wildlife of the Great Plains. Some of his work is found in the Great Plains Art Museum of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From the fall of 2005 to the winter of 2008 he traveled 100,000 miles in 12 states and three Canadian provinces taking the photographs that work appear in Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2009 (ISBN 9780226257259).

Michael Forsberg is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers.