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The Eastern Temperate Forests of North America are a vast and diverse region. Stretching inland from the Atlantic coast about 385 miles (620 km), they reach from Michigan in the north and Texas in the south; they cover the land of New England to Florida, Alabama to Michigan, and Missouri to the Appalachian Mountains.
Alaska is the most biodiverse state with 15 ecoregions across three biomes in the same realm. California comes in a close second with 13 ecoregions across four biomes in the same realm. By contrast, Rhode Island is the least biodiverse with just one ecoregion—the Northeastern coastal forests —encompassing the entire state.
The area is a temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome transition zone between the true boreal forest to the north and the Big Woods and Carolinian forest to the south, with characteristics of each. It has areas of both broadleaf and conifer forest cover, and bodies of water ranging from lakes to conifer bogs and swamps. [2]
Upper slope hardwood–conifer mixed forests are an area of transition between the northern hardwood and the mountain conifer forests. They are similar to hardwood–conifer forests, but with no red maple. Red spruce and eastern hemlock, together with sugar maple, yellow birch, and American beech are the dominant species, with scattered white pine.
Open forests of ponderosa pine and some lodgepole pine distinguish this region from the Cascades ecoregion, where hemlock and fir forests are more common, and from the lower, drier ecoregions to the east, where shrubs and grasslands are predominant. The vegetation is adapted to the prevailing dry, continental climate and frequent wildfire.
Save for a few pockets of old growth forest, the current forests, which contain most of the presettlement species in different relative abundances and distribution, originated at that time. The heavy cutting favored hardwoods and created massive amounts of coniferous slash, providing ideal conditions for widespread and intense fires.
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This ecoregion contains a number of mountainous areas on the east coast of Canada and along the Saint Lawrence River in eastern Quebec (including Anticosti Island in the Saint Lawrence) and the coast up to near Labrador, on the island of Newfoundland, in the highlands of New Brunswick, and the Cape Breton Highlands on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.