Mendocino County lies within the North Coastal Basin Bioregion, part of the Klamath Ecoregion. It comprises all the watersheds draining into the Pacific Ocean south of the Klamath River and north of San Francisco Bay.
Our region's bestknown natural and scenic features are the redwood forests and the rugged coastline. Two of the best-known residents of our region are the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet, which have received much notoriety in recent years.
However, the area contains many lesser-known features and species, including unique coastal prairies and numerous endemic plants. Our rivers once supported six species of anadromous salmonids* (For this and other marked terms, see "Scientific Definitions" on page 12) as well as numerous lesserknown species of fish and other vertebrates.
The redwood "rainforest," which characterizes this region, is unique in that it resides on the edge of the Pacific Ocean in an area having a basic Mediterranean climateÑthat is, with most rain coming in the winter months. This forest is a relict* of more widespread ArctoTertiary forests* that once covered much of the West.
For most of the region, the months of June, July, and August (at a minimum) are virtually without rainfall. Being adjacent to the ocean, however, the region is regularly covered by fog during the summer months. Much of the effective precipitation in this redwood/fog belt comes from the phenomenon of "fog drip"Ñthe ability of the redwood trees to capture fog from the air and transport it to the ground, where it is utilized by many other lifeforms.
High rates of uplift, high rainfall, and unstable rock types in this region produce exceptionally high natural sediment yields. Logging and grazing within these watersheds have exacerbated the existing conditions, producing some of the highest sediment yields measured in the United States.
Intensive forestry, as practiced in the region for decades, has not only caused erosion and nutrient loss, but has also fundamentally decreased the capability of the ecosystem to capture moisture from fog during the hot, dry months of summer.
Overall, considering the unstable soils and relictual* forests, with unique flora and fauna, the North Coastal Basin is a region that is highly sensitive to landuse impacts.
Unlike other portions of Northern California and Southern Oregon, which contain more than 80 percent public (mostly federal) land, the North Coastal Basin consists of approximately 90 percent privately-owned lands, the major owners of which are corporate timber companies.
Ever since 1917, when a highway was punched north from San Francisco through the redwood region to the Oregon border, conservationists have been working to protect oldgrowth redwood forests. In spite of their efforts, only 10 percent of the land area within the natural range of coast redwood remained as old-growth redwood forest in 1986.
Of this 10 percent, approximately 90,900 acres (approximately 46 percent) are on private lands. This privateland acreage contained approximately 3.5 billion board feet of oldgrowth redwood timber, of which 1.5 billion board feet were removed between 1986 and 1996, leaving approximately two billion board feet on private lands.
In recent years, concern has shifted to impacts on secondgrowth forests. California's commercial forests are logged three times faster than the national average, andÑon privately owned industry landsÑharvest each year exceeds growth by 22 percent.
Private land sales and corporate takeovers are emerging as a threat to sustainable management, because sustainable management results in an undervaluation of timber holdings at current discount rates compared with rapid extraction and sale of the trees.
Thus, businesses tending toward sustainable management are ripe for takeover by companies intending to extract resources quickly. As a result, many corporate timber companies lack incentives for sustainable management of timber resources, to say nothing of comprehensive management to conserve biodiversity.
California has a Forest Practices Act that theoretically regulates forest practices on private lands to ensure that they produce "maximum sustained yield of high quality forest products." In spite of this regulation, timber inventories on industrial forestlands on the North Coast have steadily declined since the Act was passed in 1973, and are projected to continue to decline until at least 2020.
Comprehensive data are difficult to obtain, but available evidence suggests that from a purely economic point of view these forests are not nearly as productive as their potential. In Mendocino County, boardfoot production from commercial timberland could have been two to three times as high as at present, had the forests been managed for longterm rather than shortterm profit, and had harvest not consistently exceeded growth.
From an ecological perspective, such intensive logging and road building not only reduce biomass, but also harm terrestrial and aquatic habitats through (1) loss of oldgrowth habitat, (2) fragmentation of remaining mature stands, (3) displacement of species dependent upon mature trees or dead wood, (4) alteration of tree stand composition, (5) longterm loss of soil fertility, (6) removal of riparian vegetation, (7) soil erosion and disturbance, (8) streambank erosion, (9) altered stream flow regimes, (10) loss of stream shade, and (11) increased sediment load in streams.
Unfortunately, the state lacks the information and biological review capacity to consistently assess the effects of harvest activities on wildlife species and their habitats. The net result of all of these factors and others is that the North Coastal Basin ecosystem is severely degraded.
The following are key manifestations of this degradation:
¥ Redwood forests have been cut to the point where only four percent of the original area remains old growth, and that continues to be cut;
¥ All of the anadromous fisheries of the region are either in decline or gone;
¥ Virtually all of the rivers of the region have been declared "impaired," primarily by sediment, under Section 305b of the Federal Clean Water Act;
¥ Coho salmon have been declared "threatened" by the National Marine Fisheries Service throughout the region, and steelhead trout are also listed as threatened in part of the region and are being considered for listing in other parts;
¥ Numerous other species of plants and animals of the region are formally listed as either threatened or endangered or are in some way "at risk" although not yet formally categorized as such.
The unique challenges of developing a strategy for ecological recovery in our ecoregion revolve around the following regional characteristics:
¥ Limited acreage of public lands or existing reserves and high percentage of private lands;
¥ High percentage of lands owned by corporations with little incentive for longterm stewardship and ineffective regulatory enforcement;
¥ Severely degraded forest and riverine ecosystems;
¥ Ecosystems relatively sensitive to human disturbance because of relictual* vegetation and inherently unstable soils, combined with Mediterranean climate. *(see Scientific Definitions on this page).
Although there has been severe disruption of many of the forest and riverine ecosystems in this region, in some ways the region has more potential for ecological recovery than many other parts of California.
This is primarily because of the lower human population density. The four counties that make up the total ecoregion have a population of 600,000, of which more than 60 percent is concentrated in the southernmost county (Sonoma), which sits next to the greater San Francisco Bay area.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1999
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited