6. Ecosystem Services with Diverse Forest Landowners

Pacific Northwest moist coniferous forests provide a wide array of globally important goods and services, including water, carbon sequestration, wood products, fish and wildlife habitat, cultural values, and world-class recreation. These forests are owned and managed by a mix of public, private, and tribal landowners (plates 6, 7), however, who often have different forest-management objectives. Overall, this diverse landownership provides a highly variable forest landscape with forest-management objectives ranging from intensive management on industrial forestlands, to longer rotations on state and tribal lands, to an emphasis on preservation and restoration of late-successional forests to support endangered species and water quality on federal lands. In this chapter, we synthesize some of the objectives of different landowners in the region and the potential opportunities and challenges of integrating goods and services (ecosystem services) into forest management. We show how broad assessment of ecosystem services can be used to plan management activities and to evaluate trade-offs of managing public and private lands to provide a suite of goods and services.