Pacific coastal forests of redwood, Douglas-fir, and other large conifers are often seen as damp, mossy rainforests that develop complex old-forest structure and giant overstory trees in the absence of wildfire. Despite their perception as rainforests, these ecocultural systems have a history of Indigenous stewardship through cultural burning, and some are best described as temperate fire forests. This is because old-growth trees and forest structure and composition often developed with frequent to moderately frequent non-stand-replacing fire. Landscapes were likely composed of a mosaic of forest patches of different ages and development histories, with embedded patches of open, fire-tended habitats that provided cultural resources.

Several dendrochronological or “tree ring” records of historical fires described in Lorimer et al. (2009) upended the paradigm of infrequent fire in coast redwood forests of northern California. Much farther north, Bakker et al. (2019) found that frequent, low-severity fires maintained oak woodlands on the Washington San Juan Islands. Frequent to moderately-frequent mixed-severity fire shaped Douglas-fir forests in the Oregon west Cascades, central Oregon Coast Range, and on the Olympic Peninsula, as described by Johnston et al. (2013), Varner et al. 2017, and a report from the Elliott State Research Forest. Even in British Columbia coastal rainforests, Hoffman et al. (2016) describe analyses of charcoal, tree-ring records, and pollen from culturally important species, supporting the hypothesis that Indigenous Peoples practiced fire stewardship to shape historical vegetation – and were the primary driver of the historical fire regime. Despite a shift to a cooler, wetter climate that theoretically should have suppressed fire, fire frequency and culturally important species increased as Pacific coastal Indigenous populations grew around 6,000 years BCE.

Indigenous Knowledge and historical accounts of landscape conditions provide a rich understanding of the purpose and characteristics of cultural burning, which fostered robust cultural resources and diverse vegetation structure and composition. For example, Indigenous Peoples regularly burned coastal prairies to provide forage for deer and elk and maintain camas and berry production. The occasional spread of these fires into moist wetlands maintained beargrass that was used for basketry and clothing.

In the mid-18th century, Pacific coastal forest landscapes shifted dramatically. Landscapes with a mosaic of habitats resulting from variation in the frequency and effects of past fires were replaced by more extensive, dense, closed-canopy forests, where fire-stewardship was excluded, and cultural resources were scarce. This dramatic shift in historical versus contemporary Pacific coastal forests is reflected in an early account of historically open landscape conditions on the Siuslaw River near Florence, Oregon:

“When they went out hunting, in June or July, the Indians set fire to the mountains in order to keep the country from being covered in brush. There were only scattered trees, very few trees, so that hunting was easier. From Hatchhouse up to Cape Mt., seven miles along the North Fork, it was all under ashes, deer could be seen then, large and small marshes could be seen where the deer could be caught. It was fine beautiful open country then…no brush; every year they set fire to all the brush.”

- Jacobs Melville, describing the Central Oregon Coast Range in the 1840s. Hatchouse lies near the confluence of the north fork and main fork of the Siuslaw River just three miles west of the Pacific Ocean in present day Florence, Oregon.

Contributors: Andrew Merschel, Ashley Russell, Colin Beck, Pascal Berrill, and Kellen Nelson