The Northern Coast Range AMA is 250,000 acres of federal forest lands scattered between Tillamook and Newport in the Oregon Coast Range (see map). Most of the rest of the lands are managed by private industrial forest companies, other private landowners, the State, and Native American tribes.
What are these forests like now?
The Northern Coast Range AMA is a mixture of hardwood and conifer forests,
young plantations, and recent clearcuts. Few trees are over 100 years old,
and there is very little old-growth because of large historic fires and
logging. Numbers of fish (especially salmon) are much lower than in the
past, partly because of loss of fish habitat due to sediment from logging
roads and the lack of large wood in streams.
People are very much a part of these forests. Many of the federal lands are intermixed with privately-owned lands. Several small communities are nestled in the valleys in and around the AMA. Many people have favorite fishing spots, hunting areas, or campsites in these forests. And logs from the federal forests have been important to the economy and culture of the local communities for many years.
What are some things we can do?
One of our primary goals is to find ways to encourage plantations and
young conifer and hardwood stands to develop into old-growth-like stands,
while providing some timber to local communities. Because many of our forests
are very dense and often dominated by one tree species, we may be able
to speed up forest development by selectively cutting some of the trees.
Then, the big trees could grow faster and new generations of trees could
get started underneath. The best answer for how, when, and where to do
this "thinning" is not clear; there are many different approaches we could
try.
Simple
Forest
Complex
Forest
Another primary goal is to improve fish habitat by reducing sedimentation into streams. One way could be to close roads we have no funds to maintain and putting water bars across those we want to keep open. In the short term, we can also place logs in streams to create fish habitat, but in the long term, we may want to get conifer trees to grow next to streams so that some may fall in and provide habitat on their own.
What is adaptive management?
Ten AMAs were set up in different parts of the Pacific Northwest so
that all of the people interested and involved in forest management could
"learn by doing". Encouraging development of old-growth-type forests and
restoring fisheries are things we don't yet know how to do very well.
In the past, federal agencies examined the forest, came up with a plan, and then asked the public what they thought of it. Many people felt left out or ignored by this process. Now, we want to involve you early on, so we can develop innovative solutions together that the agencies would not have thought of on their own.
We need your ideas to develop a Guide for the Northern Coast Range AMA. A general plan is due by the fall of 1996, but both site-specific and AMA-wide planning will continue past that date.
Ways we might work together
Thanks to Irene Stumpf, Willamette NF, for the great artwork
