State guide

Indiana Nature Guide

Indiana sits in the heart of the Eastern Corn Belt, a humid-continental state where the great eastern hardwood forest meets the western tallgrass prairie and, in its northwest corner, the dunes and marshes of Lake Michigan. Its nature calendar runs from a gray, snow-flecked winter through an explosive spring of woodland wildflowers, a long warm farm-country summer, and a fall that brings two of the Midwest's signature spectacles — the blaze of color over Brown County and the tens of thousands of Sandhill Cranes staging at Jasper-Pulaski. From the glaciated north (USDA zone 5b) to the unglaciated, hill-country south along the Ohio River (zone 6b), the state packs a surprising range of habitat into its modest size.