Biodiversity in the Dunes

Beverly Shores Environment

Biodiversity

We in Beverly Shores are fortunate to live in a beautiful woodland environment in the Indiana Dunes, surrounded by the Great Marsh to the south and Lake Michigan to the north. We have more biodiversity in our area than can be found just about anywhere else in the U.S. We have arctic species that are a legacy of the glaciers that dug Lake Michigan, as well as plants from the south and west, like wild orchids and prickly pear cactus.

National Park Service data shows our incredible biodiversity compared to other well-known parks. The NPS measures species by “species richness”, a count of the number of total number of species present. The table below lists species richness for vascular plants at a number of national parks. The number for the Indiana Dunes National Park is slightly below that for the much larger Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, and Yosemite parks, but greater than that for Yellowstone. The table also includes comparisons to other water's edge parks on the ocean coasts (Point Reyes, Acadia) and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Even though these units are each much larger than the Indiana Dunes National Park, they have significantly fewer plant species. The last column of the table provides a measure of species diversity by dividing species richness by park acreage. The Indiana Dunes has no biodiversity peer in this measure.

Species Richness and Diversity in National Parks