The East Central Texas forests form a long, narrow temperate broadleaf and mixed forest ecoregion of roughly 52,600 km², lying almost entirely within Texas with a small extension into southeastern Oklahoma, between the eastern Piney Woods and the western prairies. Its signature landscape is the Post Oak Savanna over gently rolling terrain, dominated by post oak and blackjack oak alongside eastern redcedar and black hickory, with the Bastrop Lost Pines holding the westernmost stands of southern pine in the U.S. The climate is humid subtropical to warm temperate, with hot summers, mild winters, and annual rainfall of about 740–1,120 mm. Heavily converted to ranching and farmland, the ecoregion is considered critically fragmented: only about 1% is protected, and it shelters the endangered Houston toad and Attwater's prairie chicken.

At a glance

About the temperate broadleaf & mixed forests biome

Four-season forests of deciduous hardwoods — oak, maple, beech — often mixed with conifers, shaped by warm summers and cold winters. Trees leaf out in spring and color in autumn; the generally fertile soils have made these forests heavily settled and farmed.

National refinement sub-regions

Catalog plants suited to this ecoregion

Computed from each plant's stated USDA zone range against this ecoregion's USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map 2023 (1991-2020 climatology) via ArcGIS FeatureServer published current zone range, with the CHELSA mid-century warming delta applied for the projection. Plants whose stated range falls outside both the current and projected zone end up dropped; the rest land in one of the three buckets below.

Collections for this ecoregion

Curated multi-plant collections whose members all fit this ecoregion's zone range — no won't-grow members smuggled in. Overall fit class shown per collection is the weakest link across its members.

Related ecoregions