Great Lakes Mesoscale convective complexs or MCCs can cause damage to wide swaths of forest and shatter glass in city buildings. These storms mainly occur during the night, and the systems sometimes have small embedded tornadoes, but more often straight-line winds accompanied by intense lightning. Historically, the Great Lakes, in addition to their lake ecology, were surrounded by various forest ecoregions (except in a relatively small area of southeast Lake Michigan where savanna or prairie occasionally intruded). Logging, urbanization, and agriculture uses have changed that relationship. In the early 21st century, Lake Superior's shores are 91% forested, Lake Huron 68%, Lake Ontario
Great Lakes Paper under the Government of Canada's immigration policy, the "Close Relatives Scheme" resulted in over 400 Ukrainian refugees being employed as workers after World War II. Great Lakes fell victim to trends in the pulp and paper industry in Northern Ontario over the past 15–20 years. Factors in the decline of Great Lakes and the pulp and paper industry in general included trends in advertising, electronic data transmission and storage and the Internet, all of which continue to have adverse effects on traditional print media. Newspaper, magazine and catalog publishing customers increasingly use other forms of media and advertising and electronic