Compatible Forest Management: Background and Context

Abstract

Let us begin by defining our area of interest: the moist maritime forests of the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Geographically (as shown in Figure 1), this includes western Oregon and Washington (the west side of the Cascade Range, the Coast Range, and the Olympic Mountains), coastal British Columbia (Coast Mountains), and island-dominated southeastern Alaska (as far north as the Kenai Peninsula). Collectively, this is the world’s northernmost temperate rainforest (Walter 1985). Although this coastal rainforest zone stretches southward to San Francisco, California, we focus our research northward from the California-Oregon border. The east-west extent of this coastal forest varies as a function of climate and elevation; the zone ranges from a few kilometers at the northern and southern extremes to several hundred kilometers in the middle of its range. Much of the northern half of this range (British Columbia north of Vancouver Island to southeastern Alaska) is in a relatively undisturbed, natural state. The forest from Vancouver Island, British Columbia to northern California contains some of the world’s most valuable and productive commercial timberlands. An important subset of the PNW is the Douglas-fir region (western Washington and Oregon), which is dominated by the fast-growing coastal Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco).