They also could have browsed on shorter plants, pulling them right out of the ground. Mammoths fed on all forms of graze, maintaining the open country of Pleistocene Florida. Together these two Proboscidean species shaped the paleoenvironment of Florida long before humans discovered it. The earliest pioneers probably found open plains and areas that were sparsely populated with trees. Great numbers of the trees were stripped of their bark and smaller trees were pushed over.
Modern elephants are capable of pushing over trees of over a foot in diameter.
Mammoths and mastodons of Florida were larger and could push over trees with even thicker trunks. A dense forest simply could not survive under the weight of their influence and only clumpy groups of trees and scrub could survive. The grasslands were tattered also. Elephants do not clip vegetation evenly as cattle do. They pull it out with their trunks or kick it up with their front feet.