The 21% for Indiana is a little deceptive, because the northern half of the state is not very wooded at all, but the further south from Indianapolis you get, the more forested it gets. You can see it on this satellite map.
The glaciers pushed all the land in the south upward and made it very hilly, which is good tree country. As for the north, it’s not because forests were clear cut. It’s actually for a worse reason. The north used to be part of one of the world’s biggest wetlands, the Grand Kankakee Marsh. It’s been almost entirely drained for farmland.
Because it’s not evenly distributed, but a good 30% of the state is heavily forested and another good 20% is forested but not heavily so. The map gives an impression (for each state really) that it is an even distribution in some way. Really, doing this in a state-by-state way as if political boundaries all made geographic sense is not very informative.
I would expect most to not be evenly distributed. Florida’s forests are likely largely the Everglades, and I’d suspect New Mexico’s are up north outside the desert.
And yeah, here in Ohio the remaining forests are largely in the south, but we were once a very forested state
Minnesota is heavily wooded, but only up north. It’s not deceptive, it’s how trees work.
I guess I know the tree cover isn’t equally distributed, but it’s not necessarily my first thought, either. Pretty human mistake.
Thanks for the interesting and informative comment. I had no idea Indiana was like that. However, I did know that Ohio is similar because I’ve done research on Hocking Hills, and one of the things I read also talked about the park being outside the range of glacial erosion and how, in general, the more southerly areas represent ancient geology.
Hocking Hills is a lovely, if heavily visited, state park in Ohio.
Who we calling deceptive? The GKM was big, but it wasn’t “no forests in northern Indiana” big.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topical_steroid_withdrawal?wprov=sfla1
It’s always weird how people get preconceived notions of what a chart graph or map should be implying and then get frustrated when those preconceptions aren’t met because that’s not the point of said map graph or chart. I mean nothing in that map implied it was spread all over the state and yet you’re angry about it for no freaking reason. And it’s such a weird preconception too, I mean who honestly thinks that Landscapes are spread evenly over an area? Anyone who went through Elementary School knows that’s not true.
