The last 10 years in the

Pacific Northwest have

seen the greatest turmoil

in forest policy since the

National Forest System

was established in the

early 1900s. Science, politics, and society are playing new, changing, and

often pivotal roles.

Conflicts over meeting

ecological, economic, and

social demands on forests

have produced widespread anxiety.

Sweeping changes in

policies for Federal lands

have caused a dramatic

shift toward protecting

biodiversity; state forests

in the region are refocusing management to

improve the compatibility

of species protection with

timber production.

Policies for managing

riparian areas of private

forest lands have been

modified as well, and may

continue to be as species

listings pose difficult

challenges. Both scientific and economic uncertainty raise concerns,

which are then exacerbated by fear of further

policy changes; viewpoints on the issues are

loudly vocal; opinions are

passionate. We are far

from being finished with

debates over forest policy.

CLAMS CHANGING THE WAY WE LEARN:

CLAMS and the future of land use

United States

Department of

Agriculture

Forest Service

April 2000

Pacific Northwest

Research Station
progressively produce, which leaves behind the notion that science

knows best, and takes a more broad-based approach to finding policy

answers.” Johnson is professor of forest resources in OSU’s College of

Forestry and a lead investigator on the CLAMS project. “In essence, it

could change the whole debate,” he says. “It could lower the level of

rhetoric and raise the level of understanding.” 

As many as 40 different researchers and graduate students, with

specialties in ecology, economics, forest management, social sciences,

hydrology, wildlife biology, modeling, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and more, have been involved in CLAMS.

Data for the project come from satellite remote sensing, GIS layers,

and field plots. In an unusual “joint-learning” step for private forestry

and public research, landowner evaluation of modeling assumptions

and simulations are used to improve the utility and accuracy of

CLAMS tools.

How Might CLAMS

Be Used?

The tools emerging from CLAMS—most notably detailed watershed maps depicting landscape change through time but also several

models and a “braintrust” of interdisciplinary researchers—offer a

wealth of assistance for various players. The Oregon Board of Forestry

has reshaped its Forestry Program for Oregon (FPFO), and the CLAMS

models should be very useful for its next statewide forestry assessment. The board has regulatory authority for state and private lands

but considers all of Oregon’s forest land in its assessments. Johnson

believes that the CLAMS models and analysis could form the analytical

backbone for part of the board’s next analysis of Oregon’s forests.

“One objective added to the most recent FPFO (1995) could

greatly influence how assessments of sustainability are done in the

future,” says Johnson. It reads: “Successful policies and strategies

must be based on an assessment of forest ecosystem conditions at a

landscape scale to assure the sustainability of natural resource-based

economies and the ecological integrity of Oregon’s forests.”

The CLAMS models and maps also could be useful for technical

assessment work that must be done by watershed councils; for baseline assessments on Federal lands; to cities and counties looking at the

current and future conditions of their lands; to private landowners,

industrial and nonindustrial, trying to foresee the effects and implications of various management options on their lands; to OSU Extension

faculty working with landowners to consider best restoration efforts at

a landscape scale; and to the Governor and his natural resource advisors to steer the Oregon Plan for Salmon and Watersheds.

The CLAMS maps and models will play a key role in helping

Federal land managers evaluate and monitor the Northwest Forest

Plan. And they will, by offering the whole landscape view, encourage

partnerships, collaboration, and the kind of “visioning” process that

some cities are already trying. 

CLAMS uses a systems modeling approach to establish the relation

among forest policy, landowner behavior, forest succession, landscape

or watershed condition, and biological and socioeconomic outputs.

B

A

hat is the availability of

timber across the landscape? What will contribute to quality fish

habitat? Will policy change

affect owl and murrelet habitat? How can I

manage simultaneously for wildlife and timber

goals? What is happening on my neighbor’s

property that might affect, or be affected by,

what happens on mine? 

Such questions are the difficult stuff of

land management and, until recently, were 

usually approached on an owner-by-owner,

species-by-species basis, with limited information, despite the demands of new forest policies

and regulations. Two related questions: How do

we learn about the Coast Range and its potential? and Can integrated research help develop

a credible means to evaluate policies?

Enter, the coastal landscape analysis and

modeling study, or CLAMS, a joint research

project of Oregon State University (OSU),

College of Forestry; the USDA Forest Service,

Pacific Northwest Research Station; and the

Oregon Department of Forestry. The research

focuses on the Oregon coast, from the ridge

of the Coast Range to the ocean, from

Astoria to Port Orford—an area containing

the state’s most productive forests and

streams and covering a diverse and 

complex mix of ownerships.

Ultimately, CLAMS will produce a set of

tools for use in assessing sustainability of different forest and land use policies through

time for visualizing how both social and ecological change will affect the landscape; in

other words, detailed dynamic mapping of the

whole landscape, including human decisions

made across that landscape. 

It also provides tools for the imagination.

“We are part of a new way of thinking,” says

Norm Johnson. “The CLAMS work enables

us, at last, to think of the entire landscape,

not just our own small piece of it, and consider how our actions will affect it. These tools

encourage us to learn about effects together,

rather than considering them from only our

own viewpoints.”

Not only that, he says, but the effort to

integrate social and ecological data has profoundly influenced how the research gets

done: “There is an extremely important social

process of ‘joint learning’ from the maps we

W

Land ownership (A)

and percentage of large

conifers (B) in the CLAMS

study area.

Tillamook

Lincoln City

Newport

Florence

Coos Bay

Eugene

Corvallis

Salem

Portland

Tillamook

Lincoln City

Newport

Florence

Coos

Bay

Eugene

Corvallis

Salem

Portland

Percentage of large conifers (>50 cm d.b.h.)

by seventh-field watersheds

(2,000 to 8,000 acres)

The CLAMS study area includes more than 5 million acres in Oregon, extending from the ridge of the Coast Range of Oregon

to the ocean, from Astoria to Port Orford.
Building Better 

Tools for Assessing 

Sustainability

The CLAMS project grew out of the coastal Oregon productivity

enhancement program, which promoted integrated management of

Oregon’s Coast Range forests. The project reflects the desire of

researchers to improve the process that was used by the Forest

Ecosystem Management Assessment Team leading up to the

Northwest Forest Plan. 

“The process was subjective and nonreproducible, an imperfect

way to analyze policy,” says Johnson. Adds Tom Spies, “All we had to

work from were general zoning maps. We had no models to show spatial relations—how things fit together over a large area with diverse

ownerships. Certainly nothing dynamic through time.” Spies is a

research forest ecologist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station

and a lead investigator with CLAMS. 

The policies that now exist in western Oregon were put in place

without the benefit of simulations of likely landscape conditions, outputs, and effects associated with the policies for different ownerships

through time, Spies and Johnson say. Rather, they were based largely

on a mixture of data from stand-level studies, intuition, and subjective

judgment, focusing on one ownership at a time, and without the 

ability to consider explicitly the landscape dynamics caused by natural disturbance forces, such as fire, flood, and landslides.

The two central goals of CLAMS are (1) to develop and evaluate

concepts and tools for understanding the patterns and dynamics of

provincial ecosystems of the Coast Range and (2) to analyze the aggregate ecological, economic, and social implications of different

landowner policies there.

How Does the

CLAMS Model Work?

An enormously complex undertaking, the general CLAMS model has

been built from existing knowledge of ecosystem dynamics, which

addresses such questions as, How do trees grow and yield both timber

and other ecosystem products under varying landscape conditions?

Which wildlife habitat is most productive, and what interactions affect

its status? How and when do landslides occur? How does the landscape

respond to different management prescriptions, from clearcut to no cut?

and How do streams and flooding influence landscape and vegetation? 

Each of these relations will be quantified mathematically in order

to run a model that will simulate what could happen under certain

conditions. There are, of course, no guarantees that any component of

the landscape will behave exactly as projected. Existing knowledge of

ecosystem dynamics is constantly improving but never absolute—“all

models are wrong because they are simplifications of complex reality,”

as Spies points out. “The act of modeling helps us identify where our

understanding and information are incomplete.”

Add to this the human element of management decisions over

time, and the complexity becomes stratospheric. He notes that the

CLAMS team is developing modeling protocols as they do the research,

it is so new.

“We cannot claim 100-percent accuracy, and people need to understand that these projections are akin to long-term weather forecasts:

they are highly educated guesses, but skepticism is well-founded,” says

Spies. “What they do give us, however, is a good look at the overall big

picture. They give us a method for weighing and comparing alternatives. They give us common currency and understanding, to work

toward common ground and agreement.” Johnson likes to compare

the maps to Impressionist paintings: perfect for conveying the overall

impression, a little hazy up close.

What Does CLAMS

Show Happening on

the Ground?

Projections of what happens to the landscape under different 

management strategies will be done at the large river basin scale, with

smaller subwatersheds (3,000 to 5,000 acres [about 4828 to 8046 km])

also recognized. The Alsea and Nehalem watersheds were selected first

to illustrate contrasts among different ownerships, with much of the

central coast Alsea being Federal lands, and much of the north coast

Nehalem being state and forest industry lands. Preliminary results 

will be refined through discussions with landowners.

In the Alsea basin watershed, the amount of old forest increases

over time, Johnson says, especially conifer-dominated old forest, largely because of the new policies on Federal land and because the boundaries of Federal and non-Federal land become clearer. The patchy

nature of past Federal harvest policy of small clearcuts significantly

decreases. The total area of hardwood forest stays about the same.

In the Nehalem basin watershed, the amount of old forest also

increases, largely because of emerging state lands policies, with the

boundaries between state and forest industry lands becoming clearer.

The total area of hardwood forest also stays about the same over 100

years. An index of old-growth forest structure rises over time on

Federal and state lands. On forest industry lands in both basins,

amount of old growth stays constant, or decreases.

Total harvest volume per year—largely softwoods—would come

mostly from the forest industry in both basins, with some thinning 

of Federal stands anticipated in the Alsea. In the Nehalem, the state

harvest increases over the next 80 years. In both basins, clearcutting

would provide most of the volume from private lands, whereas thinning would provide most wood coming from Federal and state lands.

Under these simulations, however, less than 1 percent of each basin

each year would be clearcut.

Additional Features

Planned for CLAMS

“We currently report just the board feet of harvest by hardwood

and softwood,” Johnson says. “We plan to recognize the types and

quality of wood products that will be produced, even estimating the

distribution of the harvest volume among different lumber grades 

and by species.”

There will be habitat models for several wildlife species, reflecting

the range of habitat conditions available in the Coast Range. These

will include the northern spotted owl, the marbled murrelet, elk, and

salmon. A map-based description of recreation opportunity is planned,

along with a means for estimating economic effects of timber harvest,

based on log-flow relations and an economic impact model.

“We hope that using an approach that considers social, economic,

and ecological issues in an integrated form will become the norm

rather than the exception,” Spies says. 

With the maturing of the research, CLAMS also now has communication goals: providing information about the project to diverse audiences not normally considered as research recipients (watershed

councils, city and county planners, nonindustrial private foresters, and

business and environmental groups) and “ground truthing” the data by

seeking feedback from government and private landowners on the

accuracy and utility of the models. 

For example, meetings with Oregon Forest Industry Council members helped researchers better understand how private foresters make

their land use decisions, thereby enabling the CLAMS models to more

closely represent management intentions across the landscape and into

the future. The meetings also allowed the private foresters to see how

the CLAMS model was built and what kinds of assumptions are behind the CLAMS view of the future.

“The value of these meetings is significant in helping both

researchers and industry people to understand each other’s world

views, in building trust, and in bringing our modeling projections 

as close to reality as the technology will allow,” says Spies.

What Stories Does CLAMS

Tell So Far?

Most importantly, CLAMS will show us how the resource conditions of the Oregon coast might develop through the 21st century

under current policy—location of resources, remaining old growth,

forest fragmentation, the complex ownership mosaic, wildlife, streams

and aquatic habitat, potential for timber production, recreation opportunity, and biodiversity. Starting with the current condition, the models project into the future in 5-year increments, to suggest what might

be the outcomes of current (or other designated) land use policies. 

Some historical work is also available through CLAMS, with

images of how vegetation has looked over the last 20 years, and even a

long-term “snapshot” as far back as 3,000 years ago.

Built into the models are assumptions about the management

intentions of five landowner groups—Forest Service, Bureau of Land

Management, state, nonindustrial private, and forest industry. An

assumption also is made that modeling errors are not significant

enough to alter the overall, “big picture” outcomes depicted.

Draft of projected vegetation in the Nehalem basin, Oregon.

Draft of projected vegetation in the Alsea basin, Oregon.
Critique of the models, with input from the state, Federal agencies, industry, and extension faculty, began in early 1999.

With its ability to show how landscapes may change in somewhat predictable ways in the future, the CLAMS work will contribute to decisions about conservation, restoration, and timber

management. Projections of different levels of management, from

intensive to very little (e.g., on reserves), could be used to estimate

whether management practices are sustainable across whole landscapes through time. 

The watershed-habitat quality models, once completed, will

locate watersheds with high and low salmonid habitat potential,

based in part on locations where there are big trees and where

unstable areas with high likelihood of landslides exist. Other fishrelated stories come strikingly clear when represented spatially.

First, Federal lands alone do not control all fish habitat. For

example, in some parts of the Coast Range, steelhead and chinook

may do as much as 100 percent of their spawning on Federal

lands, but smolting often occurs in streams flowing through private agricultural lands. Thus the fish story unfolds on agricultural

as well as forested lands, thereby highlighting the need for a

whole-watershed perspective.

Water resource management will move more dramatically into

the spotlight as tourism and population expand. Municipalities in

the Coast Range and along the coast already face a tenfold

increase in water demands during summer. With limited water

storage facilities in the Coast Range, sustainability and management of water resources will become central issues.

How Will People Interact With

the Landscape?

The people stories developed under CLAMS cannot all be

mapped, but they flesh out our understanding of present conditions

and future trends. Just as the state of the watershed clearly affects

fish numbers, so it affects human choices within the region. 

The three key factors affecting resource use by people in the

coast are the attraction of beaches, the rivers and their abundant

salmon. and the forests and their abundant timber. “Although timber

now plays a lesser role in coastal economies because a lot of processing has moved inland, the land area encompassed in the CLAMS

model is the most productive 5 million acres of timberland in the

United States,” says Johnson. “Fully half of Oregon’s future timber

supply is scheduled to come from the sparsely populated area

between the beaches and the Willamette Valley.”

Land use will change most around urban fringes, which are

located in a narrow strip along the coast and the edge of the

Willamette Valley; retirees and inmigration may change the overall

social and aesthetic values along the coast, particularly because a

higher proportion of the coastal population than that in Oregon or

the United States as a whole is over 65; thus outside capital is now

fueling a service economy, with recreation and tourism growing in

importance in an area once dominated by primary industry. And one

more discovery: in most parts of the Oregon coast, you cannot get

farther than 1.5 (2.4 km) miles from a road. 

“When we combine our social and ecological information and

put it together in map-based simulations, it draws people in; it lets

them put themselves in the landscape, and they thereby become

more willing to think through what the future will actually look like,”

says Johnson. Soon CLAMS will review the results of a survey to find

out how coast residents view and value biodiversity.

“I see the results of this attitude survey as potentially establishing

an important link between the socioeconomic aspects of our work

and the ecological side,” says Johnson. “This is where we find out

whether people care enough about sustaining biodiversity to actually

pay for it.”

The compilation of ecological, social, and economic data indicate that planning must evolve beyond the traditional project-byproject, species-by-species scale. It is conceivable, according to

Johnson and Spies, that by working with the entire landscape as

context, management activities can be designed across ownerships,

thereby increasing the potential for compatibility between all those

competing forest uses.

The CLAMS team has significant research and technical work

yet to complete. “Fine-scale features such as down wood often have

not been captured and, in fact, have been ignored in our forest

inventories because they were not considered important,” says

Johnson. “However, we know now how crucial they are to wildlife

habitat, so we are committed to including them in CLAMS as accurately as possible.”

Other challenges include incorporating the best possible elevation

maps of the Coast Range, to help establish which are the stable

slopes for landslide and fish models. The representation of forest

inventory may have “overaggregated” diverse elements of the landscape, including management decisions. Modeling of nonindustrial

owners is problematic, as is portrayal of agricultural lands. Finally,

much is yet to be learned about how this kind of technical-visual

information influences decisionmaking about natural resources.

Providing access to it for landowners and managers of all kinds

remains a challenge, but is a primary communication goal. Draft of pileated woodpecker habitat in the Alsea basin.
www.fsl.orst.edu/clams/

FEES PAID

USDA - FS

PERMIT NO. G-40

U.S. Department 

of Agriculture • Pacific Northwest

Research Station

333 S.W. First Avenue

P.O. Box 3890

Portland, OR 97208-3890

Official Business

Penalty for Private Use, $300

U.S. Department 

of Agriculture • Pacific Northwest

Research Station

333 S.W. First Avenue

P.O. Box 3890

Portland, OR 97208-3890

Official Business

Penalty for Private Use, $300

For more information contact:

Tom Spies

Pacific Northwest

Research Station

Forestry Sciences Laboratory

3200 SW Jefferson Way

Corvallis, OR 97331

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For more information contact:

Tom Spies

Pacific Northwest

Research Station

Forestry Sciences Laboratory

3200 SW Jefferson Way

Corvallis, OR 97331