Deciduous temperate forests can almost only be found in the boreal hemisphere, in which three main areas can be distinguished. In Europe, the deciduous and mixed forest area extends from the British islands to France and to all Central and Eastern Europe through to the Urals; in eastern Asia, they are spread in the far east of Russia, in Manchuria, Korea and Japan; in north America they occupy a large part of the area between the Great Lakes, the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico south. Although separated by thousands of kilometres, these deciduous forests are similar not only in the way they look, but also in the species of plants they are made of, even if with some differences depending on the geological history of these regions during and after the ice age.