Pre-settlement Forests Reconstructed from 19th-C Land Survey Witness Trees

The aboriginal forests of Puget Sound/Salish Sea immediately preceding Euro-American settlement have been characterized from 9,504 witness trees (randomly selected by surveying protocol and identified as to species, location, and diameter) from the original federal land surveys. Of 29 species, Douglas-fir, redcedar, and western hemlock comprised nearly 75% by abundance and (due to size) 90% by basal area; red alder and bigleaf maple were the main hardwoods. Species compositions ranged widely, from mostly Douglas-fir in dry areas to predominantly hemlock in the Cascade foothills. Region-wide average diameters of species were all under 2 ft, yet some specimens were 8-10 ft across. Of the region\u27s ~1 billion trees, extrapolations from witness trees as samples indicate that ~5 million trees in the mid 1800s were „6 ft in diameter, mainly redcedar. Four forest types were identified: a large base line Lowlands Forest Zone and three distinct outlier types (a frequently disrupted Floodplains Forest Zone; a droughty Rainshadow Forest Zone; and a moist Foothills Forest Zone that uniquely permitted classic climax ecological succession). Appraisals of forest types against present day large-tree criteria for oldgrowthness indicate that essentially the entire region\u27s forests qualified as old growth, even though sub-climax Douglas-fir predominated in the Rainshadow and Lowlands Zones, rather than hemlock, as in the Foothills Zone. Arguably, indications suggest that Lowland forests were 300-500 yrs old when the surveyecd, being much older in the Foothills Zone and somewhat younger in the Rainshadow Zone. Today only Floodplains forests resemble their aboriginal predecessors; after logging, all of the last real forests of the region have been replaced by urbanization, marginal agriculture, and second-growth woods that are mostly low-grade and alder-infested