[4] Its native range includes most of Europe, northwestern Africa, Sudan and Eritrea, Western and Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, China, Korea, Japan, Malesia, and New Guinea.

[1] The bunchgrass is most commonly found in forests and woodlands, preferring the shaded canopy, but may grow in open areas.

As this species has spread to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. it has demonstrated a capability of dominating forest understories and open grasslands to the exclusion of all other flora found in those areas.

Brachypodium sylvaticum is a newly invasive brome species in Oregon that is rapidly expanding in the Pacific Northwest.

Although B. sylvaticum appears to be in the early phases of invasion in North America, it has become a noxious weed throughout the Willamette Valley area of Oregon since the late 1980s.