georgian bay landscape link
conservation link
aquatic ecosystem link
Georgian Bay Coast Project
Georgian Bay Littoral Biosphere Reserve
"The island I donated to the Trust was zoned as developable. I didn't want anything built on it as a building would affect our privacy and our view from the adjacent island. I decided that an easement on the island would protect it from development and that the GBLT could protect it and preserve it in its natural state for future generations."

-- Adam Howard

A Return Back to Nature
Less than 150 kilometres north of the city of Toronto lies the beautiful, rugged and storied coast of eastern Georgian Bay. Georgian Bay is the 13,000 square kilometre basin in eastern Lake Huron, the planet’s third largest body of freshwater and the second largest of the Great Lakes. With the longest freshwater coast in the world, Lake Huron and Georgian Bay offer some of the wildest and most awe-inspiring shorelines in eastern North America. The landscape is striking, famous to Canadians through “Group of Seven” paintings, a long history of recreation, deep turquoise waters, washed Precambrian granite islands, wind-sculpted trees, and cool, slow summers. The Bay is bounded by the scenic limestone cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment in the southwest, and the world’s largest freshwater island, Manitoulin in the northwest. The more than thirty thousand islands along its eastern coast form the largest freshwater archipelago in the world.


The unique ecology of the Georgian Bay coast is as worthy of superlatives as is its reputation for recreation, beauty and inspiration. Unlike most of Ontario to the south, the eastern Georgian Bay landcape still retains qualities of the vast wilderness it once was. It is home to healthy populations of native flora and fauna, including large mammals and high carnivores. The area has the highest diversity of reptile and amphibian species in Canada, notably Five-lined Skink, Ontario’s only lizard, and core habitat for populations of the imperiled Eastern Massassauga rattlesnake, Eastern Fox Snake, Eastern Hognose Snake, Spotted Turtle and the provincially uncommon Prairie Warbler. The shorelines of the coast and its interior lakes are habitat for Atlantic Coastal Plain flora such as Virginia Meadow-beauty, Carolina Yellow-eyed Grass, Carey’s Smartweed, Smith’s Spike-rush and Military Rush, some of them disjunct from their Atlantic populations and all of them provincially rare or uncommon. Many other plants and animals of national, provincial and bioregional significance thrive in the region.