Restoring the Rain Forest
WILLAPA BAY ---- From here all the way north to the Olympic Peninsula, a century and a half of logging has left a landscape of young, industry-owned plantations where the original coastal rain forest once stood.
Only small pockets of that great cedar, spruce and hemlock forest survive. Passed over by loggers, they hold the genetic legacy of the original forest and provide scarce habitat for salmon and salamanders and marbled murrelets.
Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Nature Conservancy have joined forces to begin restoring a portion of that cutover forest, using the remaining pockets of ancient forest in their combined ownership as a blueprint.
With a $750,000 U.S. Department of the Interior Cooperative Conservation Initiative grant, the first of its kind in the nation, the partners are conducting an inventory of 14,000 acres and preparing to restore 1,500 acres and remove 15 miles of road over the next three years.
The challenges and the rewards of forest restoration are evident in the 5,600-acre Ellsworth Creek watershed, near the mouth of the Naselle River just east of Willapa Bay. The nonprofit conservancy owns the entire watershed, about 75 miles west of Vancouver. The purchase, done in stages, was completed in 2001. Ellsworth Creek is now the only fully protected coastal watershed of any size in Washington. One of the conservancy's first tasks has been to remove substandard roads built on fill.
Continue reading this story from the Vancouver Columbian:
Restoring rain forest
