Search

Conservation of old-growth forests has become an increasingly important objective of Forest Service managers over the last three decades. The US Forest Service recently made changes to policies that prohibit cutting of live trees >53 cm (the “21-inch rule”). We review the disturbance ecology of dry and mesic old-growth forests of Oregon and contrast conservation policies for these two forest types. We describe the development of age-based alternatives to the 21-inch rule on the Klamath Reservation and in the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon. We conclude by outlining an adaptive management strategy to conserve dry forest old growth that seeks to restore the ecological processes that perpetuate old tree populations over time. We argue that what is good for dry forest ecosystems is good for dry forest old growth, especially in the face of changing climate and disturbance regimes.

We outline elements of a forest restoration strategy designed to produce ecological and economic benefits on federal forests in Oregon and Washington, along with some of their policy and management implications. Implementation of this restoration strategy has begun on 11 projects (at scales from hundreds to thousands of acres) on federal lands. On Moist Forest sites (MF), the strategy calls for reserving older forest stands, thinning plantations to accelerate development of structural complexity, and implementing variable retention harvests in younger forests to help provide diverse early seral ecosystems. On Dry Forest (DF) sites, the strategy calls for silvicultural treatments that retain and release older trees, reduce stand densities, shift composition toward fireand drought-tolerant tree species, and incorporate spatial heterogeneity at multiple spatial scales. Immediate goals of this restoration framework include increased ecological integrity and resilience in DFs, increased diversity and complexity of successional stages in MFs, and provision of wood products to local communities. Over the long run, we believe this program can provide an acceptable pathway to sustained yield on federal forestlands in the Pacific Northwest.

The use of ecological forestry to achieve management objectives, such as the maintenance of native biodiversity, has become increasingly common on public and private ownerships in North America. These approaches generally use natural disturbance processes and their structural and compositional outcomes as models for designing silvicultural prescriptions that restore or sustain complex structural and compositional conditions in actively managed forests. Although the origin of ecological forestry is generally credited to approaches developing out of the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s (Franklin 1989), there is a great richness and tradition in applying ecological principles to guide forest management in North America that far predates these important contributions. This Roots article explores the early history of ecological forestry, culminating in the contributions of early scientists at the Harvard Forest that resulted in the first use of this term in the North American forestry literature by Steven Spurr and Al Cline in their 1942 Journal of Forestry article (Spurr and Cline 1942).