A century of fire suppression across the Western United States has led to more crowded forests and increased competition for resources. Studies of forest thinning or stand conditions after mortality events have provided indirect evidence for how competition can promote drought stress and predispose forests to severe fire and/or bark beetle outbreaks. Here, we demonstrate linkages between fire deficits and increasing drought st...

Forests dominated by Douglas‐fir and western hemlock in the Pacific Northwest of the United States have strongly influenced concepts and policy concerning old‐growth forest conservation. Despite the attention to their old‐growth characteristics, a tendency remains to view their disturbance ecology in relatively simple terms, emphasizing infrequent, stand‐replacing (SR) fire and an associated linear pathway toward development o...

A decade after its creation, the Northwest Forest Plan is contributing to the conservation of old‐growth forests on federal land. However, the success and outlook for the plan are questionable in the dry provinces, where losses of old growth to wildfire have been relatively high and risks of further loss remain. We summarize the state of knowledge of old‐growth forests in the plan area, identify challenges to conserve them, an...

An ecological understanding of old-growth requires a multiscale perspective, ranging from individual trees to regions. A consensus on a single general ecological definition of old-growth will never be reached, but that should not preclude the development of specific definitions needed by managers. Old-growth forests share many attributes, such as spatial heterogeneity, but they also differ in many ways. Given the complexity an...

We are assessing the potential for current and alternative policies in the Oregon Coast Range to affect habitat capability for a suite of forest resources. We provide an example of a spatially explicit habitat capability model for northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) to illustrate the approach we are taking to assess potential changes in habitat capability for vertebrates across the Coast Range. The model was bas...

We developed the landscape age‐class demographics simulator ( LADS) to model historical variability in the amount of old‐growth and late‐successional forest in the Oregon Coast Range over the past 3,000 years. The model simulated temporal and spatial patterns of forest fires along with the resulting fluctuations in the distribution of forest age classes across the landscape. Parameters describing historical fire regimes were d...