page_title: Pacific temperate rainforests
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Pacific temperate rainforests / History
caption_attribution_description: Spruce Nature Trail Description: Acer circinatum English: Vine Maple (light green leaves), Sword Fern (on both sides of trail), moss covered Bigleaf Maple limbs and roots, and hiker. Viewpoint location: Spruce Nature Trail about 0.1 km from the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center, near the end of the loop. The Hoh River Valley is located in Olympic National Park, Washington, USA. USGS Owl Mountain Quad Viewpoint elevation: 560'+ View direction: Northwest. Camera: Canon PowerShot S110 Photographer: Walter Siegmund ©2005 Walter Siegmund
context_page_description: The Pacific temperate rainforests ecoregion of North America is the largest temperate rain forest ecoregion on the planet as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. The Pacific temperate rain forests lie along the western side of the Pacific Coast Ranges along the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America from the Prince William Sound in Alaska through the British Columbia Coast to Northern California, and are part of the Nearctic realm, as also defined by the World Wildlife Fund. The Pacific temperate rain forests are characterized by a high amount of rainfall, in some areas more than 300 cm per year and moderate temperatures in both the summer and winter months.
  This ecoregion is a subregion of the Cascadia bioregion.
  These rain forests occur in a number of ecoregions, which vary in their species composition, but are predominantly of conifers, sometimes with an understory of broadleaf trees, ferns and shrubs.
context_section_description: About 200 million years ago (during the Triassic and Jurassic periods), the landscape was dominated by conifers, which were the most diverse group of trees and constituted the greatest majority of large trees. When flowering plants emerged (in the following Cretaceous period), they quickly prevailed, causing most conifers to become extinct, and those that survived to adapt to harsh conditions. Perhaps the most significant difference in this change is that the primitive conifers invested their energy in the basic food supply for every seed, with no certainty of fertilization; by contrast, flowering plants create the food supply for a seed only after it is triggered by fertilization. The Pacific temperate rain forest now remains the only region on Earth of noteworthy size and significance where, due to unique climatic conditions, the conifers flourish as they did before being displaced by flowering plants. The northern Pacific temperate rain forests are relatively young, emerging in the past few thousand years following the retreat of the ice sheets of the last ice age.
caption: Dense growths of epiphytes and mosses cover the trees, and the understory vegetation is lush.
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