Evaluating Restoration Treatment Effectiveness through a Comparison of Residual Composition, Structure, and Spatial Pattern with Historical Reference Sites

Forest-restoration efforts are increasing in the western United States in response to realized and expected changes in climate and disturbance regimes. Managers are challenged to find practical and defensible targets to shift forest composition, structure, and spatial pattern to a more resistant and resilient state. The Northeast Washington Forest Vision 2020 project on the Colville National Forest presented an opportunity to map and use previously uncaptured mesic stand-level historical reference conditions to a large restoration project. We reconstructed historical forest conditions in 12 plots across a range of plant-association groups and mapped five restoration treatment units after implementation. We evaluated treatment effectiveness both in terms of meeting the prescriptions’ stated objectives and by similarity to observed reference conditions using metrics of density, species composition, clump-size patterns, and open-space patterns. We found that dry plant associations were historically dominated by distributed clumps of large shade-intolerant trees, whereas cold mesic plant associations were structured as a gap-matrix spatial pattern. Treatments were effective at meeting prescribed density and species-composition targets, but generally resulted in stands that were overly uniform or clumped compared to historical reference conditions.