State guide

Ohio Nature Guide

Ohio sits at a crossroads of the eastern hardwood forest, the tallgrass prairie, and the Great Lakes, blending Midwestern farmland with the rugged Allegheny Plateau and the marshes of Lake Erie. That mix gives the state a rich, four-season nature calendar — a cold humid-continental winter, an explosive spring that draws world-famous warbler migration to the Lake Erie shore, a green farm-country summer, and a long, brilliant maple-and-oak fall. Across USDA zones 5b in the snowbelt to 7a along the Ohio River, the landscape ranges from sandhill-crane wetlands and old-growth ravines to buckeye groves and sugar-maple woods.