An oak savanna in Island Lake State Recreation Area, near Brighton, Michigan. Oak savannas once covered significant portions of southern Michigan, southern Wisconsin, Indiana, northwest Ohio, and southwestern Ontario. They are in many ways the meeting of worlds between the eastern mixed forests and the interior grasslands. In Michigan and Ontario they tend to be inter-mixed with forests, whereas in much of the rest of their area they form more open landscapes. Early settlers who saw them commented on how beautiful and park-like they looked, even as they were plowing them over into farms and settlements. These days very few of them remain, but they are often targeted as special conservation areas and have even started to get attention as possible landscape choices for larger properties.
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