Detroit Free Press
Keith Matheny

It's as integral a part of Michigan's fabric as its lakes and rivers: more than 20 million acres of forest land − the hickory and oak trees of southern Michigan giving way to forests of sugar maple, birch and evergreens that surround northbound travelers.

But a warming climate is harming and transforming the woods, with further, even more dramatic impacts projected by near the end of the century.

Michigan has perhaps the most exceptional forest makeup in North America, as boundaries of multiple forest types converge here: The vast boreal forest, its cold-hardy conifer trees stretching far into Canada, dips into the Upper Peninsula and northern Michigan. A diverse mixed zone then gives way to the great Eastern Broadleaf Forest across the central and southern Lower Peninsula, dominated by beech, maple, oak and hickory trees. Even the grassland prairies of the Plains states extend into far southwest Michigan.

It's the changes happening first at these border zones that give Michigan a front-row seat to climate change impacts on the forest the rest of the 21st century.

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