Protecting biodiversity has become a major goal in managing coastal forests in the Pacific Northwest--an area in which human activities have had a significant influence on landscape change. A complex pattern of public and private forest ownership, combined with new regulations for each owner group, raises questions about how well and how efficiently these policies achieve their biodiversity goals. To develop a deeper understanding of the aggregate effect of forest policies, we simulated forest structures, timber production, and socioeconomic conditions over time for the mixture of private and public lands in the 2.3-million-ha Coast Range Physiographic Province of Oregon. To make these projections, we recognized both vegetative complexity at the stand level and spatial complexity at the landscape level. We focused on the two major factors influencing landscape change in the forests of the Coast Range: (1) land use, especially development for houses and cities, and (2) forest management, especially clearcutting. Our simulations of current policy suggest major changes in land use on the margins of the Coast Range, a divergence in forest structure among the different owners, an increase in old-growth forests, and a continuing loss of the structural elements associated with diverse young forests. Our simulations also suggest that current harvest levels can be approximately maintained, with the harvest coming almost entirely from private lands. A policy alternative that retained live trees for wildlife would increase remnant structures but at a cost to landowners (5-7% reduction in timber production). Another alternative that precluded thinning of plantations on federal land would significantly reduce the area of very large diameter (>75 cm dbh) conifer forests 100 years into the future

The Forest Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is dedicated to the principle of multiple use management of the Nation's forest resources for sustained yields of wood, water, forage, wildlife, and recreation. Through forestry research, cooperation with the States and private forest owners, and management of the national forests and national grasslands, it strives-as directed by Congress-to provide increasingly greater service to a growing Nation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) prohibits discrimination in all its programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, and where applicable, sex, marital status, familial status, parental status, religion, sexual orientation, genetic information, political beliefs, reprisal, or because all or part of an individual's income is derived from any public assistance program. (Not all prohibited bases apply to all programs.) Persons with disabilities who require alternative means for communication of program information (Braille, large print, audiotape, etc.

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Changes in human land use patterns have wide-ranging social, economic and ecological implications. How urban and residential areas develop to accommodate population increase can have varying effects on forest and agricultural production from resource lands. Estimates of the amount and type of land use change differ substantially with definitions and analytical methods used. The purpose of this study was to apply a robust manual image classification method to assess changes in land use and housing density across Washington state for a 30-year period. Digital imagery from 1976, 1994, and 2006 was classified to land use, classifications were assigned to a systematic-random grid of 44,554 photointerpretation points on nonfederal lands, and houses were identified within 80-ac circles around each nonurban point. Population in the state increased by 2.5 million people (66 percent) over the 30-year period, during which time 1.16 million acres were converted from forest and agriculture land use classes to residential and urban land uses. The greatest changes were in western Washington, where forest lands declined at a rate of 0.2 percent per year and intensive agricultural lands declined at a rate of 0.7 percent per year. Twenty percent of nonfederal land in western Washington was in developed land uses in 2006. The density of housing structures on lands that remained in forest and agricultural land uses also increased over the period of interest, particularly in areas close to developed land uses. The rate of housing increase on resource lands was greater from 1994 to 2006 than from 1976 to 1994 in eastern Washington, but declined in western Washington. This method of assessing land use change compared favorably with other approaches, and had the advantage that it could be applied consistently to a longer period of time and allowed detailed assessment of patterns at local scales.

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