White pine-red maple swamps are unusual, forested wetlands that occur in the bed of Glacial Lake Wisconsin.  They are usually found along low gradient headwaters streams or at wetland-upland interfaces.  As the name suggests, white pine and red maple are the dominant trees, with tamarack, yellow birch, and black ash only sometimes co-occurring.  The ground is often covered in a carpet of sphagnum mosses and liverworts and two rare disjunct plants (Carex folliculata and Coryphopteris simulata) grow in the understory.  There are often springy areas and places with flowing groundwater.

White pine has a broader range than our other two native pines, being found across the northern part of the state and growing down the coast of Lake Michigan to (at least historically) near Milwaukee.  In the Driftless Area, white pine is a common sight on large Ordovician St. Peter Sandstone and Cambrian Sandstone rock outcrops and bluffs in the appropriately named “pine relicts”.  The plant communities in these relicts are often composed of species that are more common northward (McIntosh, 1950).  Ziegler (1995) investigated a handful of these sites and showed that most of them occur on north-facing slopes.  She posited that browsing by deer, trampling by cattle, and logging history greatly influenced whether relict stands were reproducing well.  White pine was an important component of northern mesic forests with sugar maple and hemlock but almost all of them were logged out during European settlement.