Southern Great Lakes forests Southern Great Lakes forests The Southern Great Lakes lowland forests is a temperate broadleaf and mixed forest ecoregion of North America, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. It lies mostly in the central northeastern United States and extends into southeast central Canada. This area includes the southern half of Michigan's Lower Peninsula, and much of Indiana and Ohio. It also extends through the southern half of Southwest Ontario from Windsor to Toronto and into Pennsylvania and New York on the southern rims of lakes Erie and Ontario. This region is characterized by warm-to-hot summers and mild-to-cold, snowy winters. This
Great Lakes region Hudson, Mohawk and Susquehanna form an arc of watersheds east to The Atlantic. The Great Lakes region, as distinct from the Great Lakes Basin, defines a unit of sub-national political entities defined by the U.S. states and the Canadian Province of Ontario encompassing the Great Lakes watershed, and the states and Province bordering one or more of the Great Lakes. Prior to European settlement, Iroquoian people lived around Lakes Erie and Ontario, Algonquian peoples around most of the rest, and a variety of other indigenous nation-peoples including the Lakotan, Ojibwa, Illinois, Pottawatmie, Huron, Shawnee, Erie, Fox, Miami, Crow and Ho-Chunk