Background
What is Five Rivers?
   A 76,000-acre watershed in the Oregon Coast Range with Forest Service, BLM, and private lands;
   An operational, landscape-management plan for 32,000 acres of Forest Service land in the watershed;
   A 16,000-acre landscape experiment with four replications randomly assigned to 1,300-acre “roadsheds;”
   A 76,000-acre retrospective study learning from past actions, monitoring, and natural disturbances; and
   A partnership of the Pacific Northwest Research Station, Oregon State University, the Siuslaw NF, and the Salem BLM.
What is the Five Rivers landscape experiment?
   A management experiment that demonstrates what active adaptive management is, as called for in the Northwest Forest Plan;
   Three pathways to achieve the late-successional and riparian reserve objectives will be rigorously compared:
      Passive–-decommissions roads, allows existing plantations and aquatic systems to achieve objectives on their own;
      Continuous–-maintains roads open and thins plantations and restores streams frequently and at low intensity; and
      Pulsed–-thins plantations and restores streams aggressively, then closes roads for 30 years before reopening them for
       further management.
What will be done?
   Collect pretreatment data and install the landscape experiment;
   Monitor to see how well the three pathways meet the Plan;
   Create an intensive GIS with all known, previously collected data and air-photo layers for the watershed; and
   Study effects of ecosystem-development history (interactions of people and nature) on current productivity and biodiversity. 
What are the expected outcomes?
   An analysis of the relations between forest history and current biodiversity and productivity;
   An understanding of process across scales (0.1-acre plots, 40-acre units, and 1300-acre roadsheds) and boundaries;
   The role of past disturbance in present and future stand behavior;
   Improved forest management through time;
   New insights into the role of roads in managed forests; and
   An extension to regional scale through collaboration with CLAMS (http://www.fsl.orst.edu/clams/).
Who benefits?
   Public and private land managers who are using adaptive management;
   Local governments and watershed organizations; and
   Land managers in other regions.