Western Great Lakes forests Western Great Lakes forests The Western Great Lakes forests is a terrestrial ecoregion as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. It is within the Temperate Broadleaf and Mixed Forests ecozone of North America, in the United States' states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba. The Western Great Lakes forests, in large part, lie in the northwestern Great Lakes Basin near the shores of Lake Huron, Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, including the entire Upper peninsula of Michigan and large parts of Northern Wisconsin, around Lake Superior into much of northern Minnesota and a
Great Lakes for Lakes Ontario and Erie were created, along with what would become the Saint Lawrence River. The Great Lakes are estimated to have been formed at the end of the last glacial period (the Wisconsin glaciation ended 10,000 to 12,000 years ago), when the Laurentide Ice Sheet receded. The retreat of the ice sheet left behind a large amount of meltwater (see Lake Algonquin, Lake Chicago, Glacial Lake Iroquois, and Champlain Sea) that filled up the basins that the glaciers had carved, thus creating the Great Lakes as we know them today. Because of the uneven nature of glacier erosion,