Fig. 6

Example of variable retention harvest as practiced across > 500,000 ha of lands managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources. Variable retention has been the DNR’s primary approach to regeneration harvests since the late 1990s, with an overall objective of maintaining and promoting large structurally unique trees, snags, and down wood over time. The minimum retention of 20 trees per hectare (mix of dispersed and aggregated pattern depending on individual unit) occurs in addition to that in riparian buffers, unstable slopes, gene pool reserves, old-growth deferrals, and other conservation-driven allocations