| Managing the Tillamook State Forest |
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| The Tillamook State Forest: |
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A thriving, managed, second-growth forest.
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| Today's forests provide many resources. |
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The Tillamook State Forest is managed today by the Oregon Department of Forestry to be a healthy, productive, and sustainable ecosystem that provides a full range of social, economic and environmental benefits to the people of Oregon.
And it’s a second-growth forest, replanted by hand following major wildfires and timber harvesting activities in the early part of this century.
Thanks to the foresight of foresters and leaders a generation ago and a new generation of foresters, resource specialists, biologists and planners today, this landscape is providing Oregonians with the things they need and use everyday: from wood products and revenue to clean air and water. From fish and wildlife habitat to hiking trails. So what does it mean that this is a "managed" forest? What are we managing for and what does that management look like in action?
The essence of managing any resource, whether timber, water or wildlife, is to provide careful and thoughtful plans and actions to ensure long-term health, productivity and sustainability. Management means caring enough about a resource to understand it, and to understand how we should relate to it.
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| The Past is Key to the Future |
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To understand management of the Tillamook State Forest today and what the future holds, you have to begin with a basic understanding of a few key facts from the past:
The original forest covering this landscape was destroyed by a series of fires in the 1930s and 1940s. By the time rehabilitation efforts began in the late 1940s, the landscape of today’s Tillamook State Forest resembled the blast zone at Mt. St. Helens: a black, brown and gray expanse of dead snags and sterile soil.
Many private landowners, already hard-hit by the Depression, couldn’t pay their taxes, so ownership of large areas of the forest was forfeited to the counties. County governments, facing their own set of challenges, didn’t have the technical expertise or the finances to replant the blackened landscape. An agreement was struck whereby counties deeded the lands to the Oregon Department of Forestry with the knowledge that if the lands once again produced revenue, the counties would receive two-thirds of the funds.
The Department of Forestry led an epic-sized rehabilitation effort in the 1950s and 1960s that involved thousands of professional tree planters and volunteers. 1.5 million dead trees were cut. 72 million seedlings were planted by hand. 3 billion tree seeds were dropped from helicopters.
The result: today’s Tillamook State Forest, a 550-square mile expanse of trees.
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| Planting Trees Opening Chapter in Rehabilitating the Tillamook |
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As it turns out, the rehabilitation efforts following the fires were just the first step in restoring productivity and biodiversity to the landscape. The reforestation effort was largely successful, but it also left a challenging legacy for future generations of foresters, including today’s professionals entrusted with managing the Tillamook.
While tens of millions of new trees were indeed greening up the slopes and valleys of the Tillamook, a vast majority of them were not genetically acclimated to the area because fire had destroyed the seed cones that held the proper genetic blueprint. After the fires, the rehabilitation foresters had taken great pains to seek out similar topography and climate to gather seeds, but there was no substitute for "home grown" tree seeds. As a result, some trees did not grow very well.
Most of the seedlings and seeds used in the rehabilitation effort were Douglas-fir. While this species is overwhelmingly the most common tree in the Coast Range, other important species like grand fir, western hemlock and western redcedar are Tillamook forest natives. The result: a forest that could use some help in the tree species diversity department.
Roads constructed in the early years were laid in quickly, without the benefit of today’s engineering standards. Over the years, these roads were doomed to fail as the dynamic landscape shifted and changed.
And the resulting forest was basically all the same age, providing little diversity in the form and structure of individual stands. We know today that this diversity of structure, species and ages is crucial both to fish and wildlife habitat and to the overall productivity of the forest.
In addition to the physical changes since the rehabilitation years, the social, political and economic landscape has changed dramatically as well. Today, work in the Tillamook embodies a new set of public values, environmental considerations and expectations surrounding the management of forests.
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| Integrated Forest Management: A complex job in this complex place |
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All of these factors come together to mean that managers of the new Tillamook State Forest face challenges equal to if not more complex than when the first trees were planted in the shadows of the blackened stumps of the Tillamook Burn. The challenge of managing the Tillamook today requires the integration of many resources and values, using new approaches and new tools, while refining management plans and activities based on careful monitoring and new science.
The new forest management team is made up of a diverse group of professionals and technicians representing forestry and other disciplines such as wildlife, fisheries, geology, engineering, recreation planning, and education to name a few.
On any given day, a small army of professional foresters, biologists, road specialists, recreation planners and others takes to the woods to do their work.
Foresters plan and conduct timber harvest operations to provide raw materials and revenue and also create a more diverse forest with openings and various age classes of trees. As you travel through the Tillamook, you’ll surely see many forest stands that are too dense, resulting in competition among individual trees for sunlight, nutrients and water. This also has a detrimental effect on plant and wildlife habitats that depend on more open conditions. Opening up the forest through tree thinning and patch cutting increases the growth, productivity and diversity of the forest.
Foresters are also using thinning and selective cutting techniques as ways to accelerate the growth of tree stands that have older forest conditions in order to provide suitable habitat for threatened and endangered species in less time than would occur if left to a natural succession process.
Many other techniques are used to enhance forest health while also increasing wildlife and plant diversity. In many parts of the forest, a naturally-occurring disease called laminated root-rot has infected pockets of trees that must be removed to stop the spread of the disease. Tree harvests in these areas employ what are called "patch cuts" and remove all of the trees within the zone of influence of the disease. The resulting openings allow more sunlight in, creating conditions for a different set of plants and animals to live.
These important forest management activities also provide crucial revenues and raw materials. In 1997 alone, timber harvests in the Tillamook State Forest generated more than $15 million for Tillamook and Washington counties, helping to fund schools and local services. The raw materials help feed the Pacific Northwest’s booming construction industry, with trees from the Tillamook manufactured into a wide variety of structural timbers and other products.
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| The Future |
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Managing today’s Tillamook State Forest is much more complicated than just getting trees to grow. That earlier work was a crucial step in rebuilding a healthy forest. Today’s professionals continue that important work by preparing the Tillamook for the future.
The Department of Forestry is in the final phases of preparing a long-range forest management plan and a habitat conservation plan for the future of the Tillamook and other state forests in northwest Oregon. The plans have been developed in a major public process, involving more than 30 public meetings and a variety of tours. Scientific review has also fine-tuned and improved the plans.
The plans are based upon the best available science, landscape level planning and active forest management to retain a variety of forest stand structures, maintain the natural diversity of plants and animals, protect riparian habitats, address forest health concerns and mimic nature’s influence on the landscape, while also providing needed timber and associated revenues for state and local government.
Recognizing that today’s decisions may need to be reconsidered in the future, the Department of Forestry has instituted a research and monitoring program to determine whether or not key assumptions associated with the plans remain valid over time.
The concepts and strategies included in the plans have been praised by an independent science review team and by the Independent Multidisciplinary Science Team, which is assigned by the Governor to monitor the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds.
The bottom line? Because of the way this new forest has evolved and the social and cultural landscape that now encompasses it, we can’t just plant the trees and walk away. There is much work over many years in order to nurture the new forest into one that is healthy and productive and provides a full range of social, economic and environmental benefits to the people of Oregon.
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