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Track: Forestry
Diane Rainsford
United States Government
4077 Research Way
Siuslaw National Forest
Corvallis, OR 97333
Telephone: 541-750-7060
Fax: 541-750-7142
Predicting Climax Vegetation in Forests of Western Oregon
Vegetation on a landscape changes over both space and time. Climax vegetation is the ultimate, stable community that will inhabit an area, given a lack of disturbance over a long period of time. Potential climax vegetation, or plant association, can be useful to managers and scientists because it can yield information about the suitability of a site for a given land use or the response that might be expected to a particular disturbance. Western Oregon was divided into ecoregions and ecozones, based mostly on temperature and precipitation patterns. By studying plot data, we have built a model to predict how slope, aspect, elevation, and topographic moisture affect the distribution of plant associations in each of these regions and zones.
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