Indiana Dunes National Park provides a habitat for approximately 1,130 native vascular plants. The park is home to populations of 30% of Indiana’s listed rare, threatened, endangered, and special concern plant species. Shaped by glacial events and changing climates, the dunes landscape contains disjunct flora representative of eastern deciduous forests, boreal forest remnants, and species with Atlantic coast affinities. In addition, the national park is part of the upper- and eastern-most limits of the tallgrass prairie peninsula and supports high-quality remnants of this ever-diminishing vegetation type. The presence of many unique dune and wetland plant community types has to lead to a long history of botanical exploration and research. Lands within the national park have been called the birthplace of American ecology as a result of early work on plant succession performed by Dr. Henry Cowles over 100 years ago.

The Dunes are comprised of ten different habitats. Each providing for a unique combination of plants and animals. The range of the Indiana Dunes varies depending on your source. Expanding the area from the areas of lakeshore southward to the edges of the Valparaiso Moraine. The entire region has been dune landscapes for over 114,000 years before the present. Traditionally, the Indiana Dunes area thought of as a narrow area along the shores of Lake Michigan, including the areas of Marquette Park in Gary, Indiana, Indiana Dunes State Park, and Indiana Dunes National Park.