INTRODUCTION
   

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Who should read this Guide?
 

If you have an interest in the public lands within the Northern Coast Range Adaptive Management Area (AMA), then this Guide is written for you.

You can be a partner in the AMA management process, whether your interest is:

 
 

What is the purpose of the guide?
 

The purpose of this AMA Guide is, first, to help everyone understand what this Adaptive Management Area is all about.

Second, the Guide outlines how we will conduct business in the AMA--by outlining a process to follow in planning and designing activities.

Third, the Guide points the way to opportunities for you, as a partner or stakeholder, to take part:

We'll begin by explaining where the idea of AMAs came from, and then we'll describe a possible future vision for the AMA.
 
 
 

Where did the AMA idea come from?
 

The Northwest Forest Plan

On April 13, 1994, the Northwest Forest Plan (Plan) was signed by the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior. It resulted from the President's Forest Conference of April 1993 and was designed to help settle the prolonged and heated controversy about how we should manage federal forests in the Pacific Northwest.
 
The Plan's strategy is based on protecting a wide range of animal and plant species and their habitats--the building blocks of biological diversity. The strategy provides a network of reserves on federal lands to protect older forests (Late-Successional Reserves), and also provides reserves along all streams, lakes, and wetlands (Riparian Reserves). The Plan establishes certain standards and guides for land management practices within the two kinds of reserves, and other, less-restrictive standards for the federal land outside the reserves (Matrix). Recognizing that we have much to learn about ecosystem management, the Plan also created ten Adaptive Management Areas--one in each physiographic province--where new approaches to public forest land management are to be developed and tested.
 
 

Adaptive management

 Adaptation is the process of responding positively to change. As defined in Bormann et al. (1996), the term adaptive management is used to describe an approach to managing complex systems that builds on common sense and learning from experience. Adaptive management--which has sometimes been described as "learning to manage and managing to learn"--consists of three basic steps:

Monitoring is perhaps the most critical step in the process: people and funds must be provided to monitor results, analyze what happened, and feed the results back into the design of new projects. Monitoring, based on a sound sampling design, provides regular feedback about how well things are working--or not working--so that practices can be frequently modified in response to new information and changing values. The concept of adaptive management is discussed more fully in Appendix A.
 
 

Adaptive Management Areas

The team that prepared the Northwest Forest Plan applied a prescriptive approach to forest land management to meet legal requirements for protecting threatened and endangered species. They also recognized, however, that we have much to learn about how to manage forest lands for a variety of values. How could some creativity and flexibility in management be provided and some opportunities for exploring and experimenting be created and sustained? The ten Adaptive Management Areas, or AMAs, were created to help answer this question (Shannon et al. 1996). The Plan prescribes a different management emphasis for each AMA. While the agencies are directed to apply adaptive management to all federal lands in the Pacific Northwest, the AMAs were conceived particularly as places to encourage the development and testing of new technical and social approaches to forest management. Thus, learning itself becomes one of the most important objectives--and outcomes--of management. Table 1 displays the ten AMAs and the primary management emphasis for each.
 
 

Table 1. Adaptive Management Areas
 
 
AMA
Location
Acres
Management emphasis
Applegate  Oregon  277,500  Development and testing of forest management practices to provide a broad range of forest values, including late-successional forest and riparian habitat
Central Cascades  Oregon  155,700  Intensive research on ecosystem & landscape processes, integration of forest & stream management
Cispus  Washington  143,900  Integration of timber production with maintenance of late-successional forest, riparian zones, and recreational values
Finney  Washington  98,400  Restoration of late-successional forest & riparian habitat
Goosenest  California  172,900  Management to promote forest health, late-successional forest, riparian habitat, and timber production
Hayfork  California  488,500  Commercial timber production, late-successional forest, and riparian habitat
Little River  Oregon  91,800  Intensive timber production and restoration and maintenance of riparian habitat
Northern Coast Range  Oregon  281,200  Restoration and maintenance of late-successional forest, conservation of fisheries and biological diversity
Olympic  Washington  150,400  Integration of ecological and economic objectives, restore structural complexity to forests and streams
Snoqualmie Pass  Washington  212,700  Provision of late-successional forest on "checkerboard" lands to provide a north-south connective link
 
 
 

Late-successional forest

Restoring and maintaining late-successional forest is a common theme for most of the AMAs--but what is a late-successional forest? "Succession", as used here, refers to the sequence of different kinds of plant communities that come to occupy an area after the previous vegetative cover has been removed in some way. An area may be cleared by fire, flood, landslide, windstorm, or by human activities such as timber harvest. "Early-successional" plant cover, the first species to reoccupy a vacant site, generally consists of vegetation such as grass, herbs, thistles, and small shrubs. In western Oregon, this stage is followed (or succeeded) by tree seedlings, which change the character of the vegetation cover as they age and grow. The later stages of this succession ("late-successional"), as used in the Northwest Forest Plan, include mature forest (about age 80 to 190) and old growth (very roughly age 200 and older). The actual age at which late-successional and old-growth forest structure and characteristics develop varies widely from one area to another. Characteristics of late-successional forest are discussed in chapter 3. In this Guide, the term "older forest" will often be used to refer to what the Plan calls "late-successional forest."

AMA management is intended to focus not only on ecological goals, but also on economic and social concerns--especially those of local communities. The two are closely related:

The central role of Adaptive Management Areas is, as the plan states, "learn to manage, and manage to learn." Although management goals have been set at the national level, the source of new ideas for meeting these goals must be primarily local people: local citizens, managers, and scientists. Collaboration is the key to bringing these "stakeholders" together. Their contributions might be summarized as follows:
 
People in the community know the land, know what is important to them, and have ideas on how to achieve it.

Managers have the tools, resource information, and work force needed to get things done.
 
Scientists can help design activities to answer specific questions, and know how to collect the right kinds of information so that the questions are answered.
 
 

Northern Coast Range Adaptive Management Area

Our AMA is in the Oregon Coast Range, from Tillamook south almost to Newport. About 1.4 million acres are within the exterior boundary of the AMA. This boundary was drawn along watershed lines to include all Federal AMA lands, amounting to more than 281,000 cres, about 22 percent of the total area. Some 148,000 acres are Siuslaw National Forest lands administered by the USDA Forest Service, Hebo Ranger District. The remaining 133,000 acres are administered by the USDI Bureau of Land Management, Salem District, Tillamook and Marys Peak Resource Areas. Table 2 displays Federal land by county, and Map 1 displays locations of Federal, State, and Tribal lands in the AMA.
 
 

Table 2. Northern Coast AMA: Acres of Federal Land by County
 
 
County
BLM Public
Domain
BLM
O&C
National
Forest
Totals
Benton  156  778  0  934
Lincoln  6,057  0  33,128  39,185
Polk  230  39,889  1,169  41,288
Tillamook  11,033  37,035  88,849  136,917
Washington  317  4,762  0  5,079
Yamhill  60  32,961  24,837  57,858
Totals
 17,853  115,425  147,983  281,261
 
 
 


That leaves just over a million acres of other ownership in the AMA, including state forest land, tribal forests, forest industry lands, state and county parks, private woodlots, farms, and communities. Fig. 1 shows the approximate distribution of AMA lands by type of ownership.
 
 


Note that the Northwest Forest Plan gives Federal agencies no management authority regarding nonfederal lands within the AMA boundary. Cooperative management of adjacent ownerships, however, is encouraged. Map 2, Major Land Owners, illustrates the ownership of the eight largest forest industry companies in this area, along with the public and tribal lands.
 
 

The objectives for managing federal lands in the Northern Coast Range AMA are presented in the Northwest Forest Plan as follows:

The first two habitat-oriented objectives are not meant to prevent AMA lands from producing economic commodities. The AMAs were intentionally located near communities that have been affected by reduced timber harvest from federal land. Production of timber (though less than the amounts harvested in the past), special forest products, and other commodities is expected as part of the AMA program of activities.
 
 

Adaptive Management Area Plans

The Northwest Forest Plan requires each AMA to have a plan, and this Guide has been prepared to fulfill that requirement for the Northern Coast Range AMA. Why, then, are we calling it a Guide, rather than a plan? A plan usually contains decisions on allocation of lands or resources to specific uses. Existing plans include the Siuslaw Forest Plan, which was amended by the Northwest Forest Plan, and the Salem District BLM Resource Management Plan, which was tiered to the Northwest Forest Plan.

This Guide, on the other hand, is not intended to be a vehicle for documenting in-place management decisions. Instead, it is to be a working document (which means that, with your help, we'll keep revising and improving it) that will outline how we expect to do business and to help everyone interested in the AMA understand how their concerns can be reflected in management decisions. The expected effects of individual projects will be analyzed--and their results predicted--as projects are developed.