Is a sugar maple a good tree to plant in Indiana?
Sugar Maple can work here, with caveats. The signature tree of central Indiana's beech-maple woodlots and abundant in remnant woods across Marion, Hamilton and Boone counties, plus older neighborhoods where the original topsoil survived. Because it is off the recommended street-tree list, nearly everything you quote on is either a woodlot survivor stranded inside new development or a 1950s-70s yard tree, and Purdue's climate assessment projects declining habitat suitability for it in Indiana later this century.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
Sugar maple samaras ripen and drop in fall, September into October, so the helicopters and the leaves come down in one clean-up season instead of two — unlike red maple, which drops seed in spring. The leaves are large and slow to break down and will mat and smother turf if left, and mature trees over a drive shed enough fine deadwood each spring to justify a raking.
Where to keep it away from
A shallow, dense, fibrous mat in the top foot of soil — that mat is why nothing will grow underneath a mature one and why the surface roots ridge up through thin turf on compacted clay. It is also the species where nursery-container stem girdling roots do the most damage, so before diagnosing anything in the crown, excavate the trunk base: a straight-sided, flare-less base means a girdling root and a tree with a finite timeline.
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