Michigan Forest Communities - Michigan Association of ...

A SHORT HISTORY
OF MICHIGAN FORESTS
T
he diverse forests that cover much
of the Michigan landscape are the
culmination of many thousands of years
of development. Their history begins
with the slow melting and retreat of the
Wisconsin glacier, a portentous event
that marked the end of the great
Pleistocene Ice Age. The spoil left
behind by the retreating glacier represented
a biological vacuum; plants and
animals that had marked time for millennia
in ice-free areas south of the glacier
lost no time in moving north to
invade the vacated landscape. Among
these first plants were several types of
trees, the ancestors of today’s Michigan
forests.
The glacier began its retreat about
14,000 years ago. Most of the Lower
Peninsula was ice-free about 2,000
years later (Kapp 1999). At this time a
narrow belt of tundra and scattered
clumps of spruce and tamarack occupied
much of the northern Lower
Peninsula, with closed boreal forests of
spruce, fir, birch, and poplar to the
south. After the passage of another
2,000 years, the glacial margin had
receded almost to the shore of Lake
Superior in the Upper Peninsula. Boreal
conifers still dominated in the north,
but now the southern part of the state
was occupied by more complex pine-
Spruce and tamarack forests were among the first to establish after the Wisconsin glacier receded.
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