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 Protection Fund the 1986 Toxic Substances Control Agreement, signed by the Great Lakes governors. Seven Great Lakes states contributed $81,000,000 to capitalize the Fund. Each state contributed to the Fund based on its usage of Great Lakes water. The Great Lakes Research Consortium hailed the Fund as a "unique and precedent-setting conclusion to the search for a stable, long-term funding mechanism for Great Lakes research." The Great Lakes Protection Fund held its first meeting on July 12, 1989, in Chicago. The earnings from the endowment, now worth over $100 million, have supported 274 regional projects, committing more than $83 million to regional