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 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,