Plains Zebra live in all habitats in Africa from sea level to 4,300 m on Mount Kenya, with the exception of rain forests, deserts, dune forests, and Cape Sclerophyllous vegetation (Duncan 1992).

Plains Zebra live in family groups of a stallion with mares and their juvenile offspring. While each of these groups have a home range, the groups join together and move as herds in some or all parts of the year (Klingel 1969, Rubenstein 2010). The home range of Plains Zebras varies across the continent, being determined by seasonal vegetation changes and habitat quality (Smuts 1975). In East Africa, home ranges in Ngorongoro were 80-250 km² in different parts of the crater (Klingel 1969), whereas they were larger in the Serengeti: 3-400 km² in the wet season and 4-600 km² in the dry season (Klingel 1969). Combined with a migration route of 100 to 150 km in each direction, Serengeti zebras cover at least 1000 km² in a year. This can be compared with annual home ranges of 49-566 km² in Kruger National Park (Smuts 1975). In some areas the herds form discrete subpopulations, separated by natural barriers or marginal habitats (Smuts 1974). These subpopulations cover areas from 28-136 km² in Zululand (Brooks 1982) to 1530-1560 km² in Kruger National Park (Smuts 1974). In areas where resources are scarce or patchily distributed, zebras daily cover a lot of ground. In the dry season zebras moved up to 34.5 km to forage in Botswana (Brooks and Harris 2008), whereas in Ngorongoro they moved about 6 km (Klingel 1969); in Kruger National Park they tended to move less than 2 km in a day across the year (Owen-Smith 2013). Studies of zebras have shown how their spatial awareness allows them to orient movements towards preferred forage patches or the nearest water source, and thus move efficiently across large distances (Brooks and Harris 2008).

A central feature of Plains Zebra ecology is their migration, tracking resource abundance across the seasons (Young et al. 2005). One of the biggest ungulate migrations in the world occurs in the Serengeti. At a large scale zebras follow the long grass that grows after the rains (Bell 1971), at a finer scale they move to maximize intake of food of sufficient quality, while minimizing time spent in habitats where they may encounter predators (Hopcraft et al. 2010). Not all zebra herds migrate (e.g., Stelfox et al. 1986, Georgiadis et al. 2003), with different herds reacting differently to changing conditions (Owen-Smith 2013): in the Okavango Delta of Botswana only about 55% of zebras make the 588 km round trip (Bartlam-Brooks et al. 2011). Migration allows zebras to optimize their nutrition by moving to prime grasslands during the wet season (Bartlam-Brooks et al. 2013), selecting higher quality resources rather than absolute abundance of grass (Bartlam-Brooks et al. 2011). The start and pace of migration is controlled by the environment: it is initiated by cumulative precipitation, with daily movement being a function of precipitation rate and NDVI (Bartlam-Brooks et al. 2013). Zebras have the flexibility to alter their migration patterns to avoid adverse conditions or to find new resources (Bartlam-Brooks et al. 2013). As fences constrain many populations (Shem et al. 2013), this allows them to re-establish migrations once barriers are removed (Bartlam-Brooks et al. 2011).

Plains Zebras tend to be found in mid-productive grasslands in areas where there is the highest green standing crop (McNaughton 1985), selecting areas of the highest grass biomass regardless of quality (Groom and Harris 2010). Across studies Plains Zebras were found in open savanna with an abundance of grass and the presence of some trees or open woodland. The Plains Zebra diet consists almost entirely of grasses (Bodenstein et al. 2000), with occasional browse to maintain protein levels (Berry and Louw 1982). Compared to ruminants, zebras are generalist and bulk feeders, spending more time foraging (Seydack et al. 2012, Owen-Smith and Goodall 2014), and having a diet that is of lower quality (McNaughton 1985, Ben-Shahar 1991) and higher fiber (30-36% of dry matter, Macandza et al. 2013) than sympatric bovids of a similar size.

Plains Zebra range from South Sudan and southern Ethiopia, east of the Nile River, to southern Angola and northern Namibia and northern South Africa (formerly ranging south of the Orange and Vaal Rivers to the Cape) (Hack et al. 2002, Klingel 2013). They are now extinct in two countries in which they formerly occurred: Burundi and Lesotho, and are likely to be extinct in Somalia. 

The six morphologically defined subspecies are distributed as follows (following Groves and Bell 2004):

E. q. crawshaii (Crawshay’s Zebra) occurs in Zambia, east of the Luangwa River, Malawi, south-eastern Tanzania from Lake Rukwa east to Mahungoi, and Mozambique as far south as the Gorongoza district;

E. q. borensis ranges in north-west Kenya, from Guas ngishu and Lake Baringo, to the Karamoja district of Uganda and south-east South Sudan, east of the Nile River to the northern limit of the species at 32°N;

E. q. boehmi (Grant’s Zebra or Boehm's Zebra) is found in Zambia, west of the Luangwa River, west to Kariba, Shaba Province of DR Congo north to Kibanzao Plateau; Tanzania north from Nyangaui and Kibwezi into south-west Uganda, south-west Kenya as far as Sotik, and east Kenya, east of the Rift Valley, into southern Ethiopia and perhaps to the Juba River in Somalia.

E. q. chapmani (Chapman's Zebra) ranges from north-east South Africa, from about 24°S, 31°E, north to Zimbabwe, west into Botswana at about 19°S, 24°E, the Caprivi Strip in Namibia, and southeastern Angola (east of the Cubango river);

E. q. burchellii (Burchell's Zebra) formerly occurred north of the Vaal/Orange Rivers, extending north-west via southern Botswana to Etosha National Park and the Kaokoveld, south-east to KwaZulu-Natal and Swaziland, and in southwestern Angola. It is now extinct in the middle of its range. E. b. antiquorum is now included in this subspecies;

E. q. quagga (Quagga) occurred in the former Cape Province, south of the Orange and Vaal Rivers and west of the Drakensberg. Now extinct.

Plains Zebra occur in numerous protected areas across their range, including the Serengeti National Park (Tanzania), Tsavo and Masaai Mara (Kenya), Hwange National Park (Zimbabwe), Etosha National Park (Namibia), and Kruger National Park (South Africa).

Hack et al. (2002) proposed the following conservation actions for the species: 1) Improve coverage and frequency of monitoring; 2) Improve risk assessment; 3) Quantify and manage genetic diversity both globally and locally; 4) Increase the understanding of the species' basic biology'; and 5) Investigate the economics of alternative utilization strategies.

In Malawi several conservation measures for the species are ongoing: Majete Wildlife Reserve, Liwonde National Park and Nkhotakota Wildlife Reserve are now being managed by the African Parks Network, an anti-poaching project (funded by IFAW) is now running in Kasungu National Park that has trans-frontier capacity in interest to include Likusuzi and Luambe NP's in Zambia, and there is a Nyika Trans-Frontier Project which covers Nyika NP, Vwaza Marsh WR in Malawi and Musalangu Game Management Area plus the Mitenge and Lundazi Forest Reserves in Zambia (funded by KWF and run by the Malawi Department of National Parks and Wildlife).