Great Lakes’ Diversity of Life

The piping plover is listed as a threatened or endangered species across the Great Lakes Basin.© Betty Darling-Cotrille

Migratory Birds

Hundreds of millions of birds, including North America’s rarest songbird, the Kirtland’s warbler, migrate through and breed in the Great Lakes region—making it crucial to their long-term health. Piping plover, a migratory bird, breeds in the area during spring and summer. In the fall, they migrate south, wintering along the Gulf of Mexico and other locations.

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Science and the Blueprint
Organizations Taking Action

To describe the Great Lakes is to speak almost exclusively in superlatives. Among them, the lakes hold 20 percent of the world’s and 95 percent of North America’s surface fresh water. The St. Clair River Delta is the world’s largest freshwater river delta, and the lakes’ shores harbor the largest collection of freshwater sand dunes on the face of the Earth. The Great Lakes basin—comprised of eight states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec—supports 10 percent of the population of the United States and 25 percent of Canada’s. The lakes support industry, supply drinking water and food to millions, and provide a moderated climate and vast recreational opportunities.

The abundant natural resources of the Great Lakes have supported human life for thousands of years. The region includes large, unfragmented boreal forests in the north that gradually give way to the mixed and deciduous forests and tallgrass prairies in the south. Wetlands, marshes, swamps, bogs and fens dot the landscape and play a critical role in linking land with water. The Great Lakes region, with its inland waters, contains an astonishing array of plants and animals—46 species that are found nowhere else in the world, and 279 globally rare plants, animals and natural communities.

The future of these treasures, amid the world’s greatest freshwater sea, depends on coordinated conservation action.