disturbance

Climatic change is likely to affect Pacific Northwest (PNW) forests in several important ways. In this paper, we address the role of climate in four forest ecosystem processes and project the effects of future climatic change on these processes across Washington State.

The results of this synthesis illustrate several important lessons. First, current forest structure is the result of decades of fire-suppression activities, and so restoration will require multiple treatments to bring forests to within the range of historic variation.