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 Priority Region: Coastal Temperate Rainforests
Staff contacts: This Priority Region includes both the Tongass National Forest of southeast Alaska and the Great Bear Rainforest of coastal British Columbia. This narrow coastal band of forests, which includes thousands of small mountainous islands, several large islands, and many long coastal valleys, represents up to 50 percent of the world’s remaining coastal temperate rainforests. Polar and tropical air masses have converged in this precise region for millennia, creating a chronically wet environment. High annual precipitation has resulted in the relative absence of fire throughout the region, and wind is the primary natural disturbance. The predominant forest types in the region are coastal Sitka spruce-hemlock and coastal Sitka spruce-Douglas fir. The coastline and landscape are highly irregular and range from long fjords and alluvial fans to peatlands and limestone caves. These intensely productive old-growth forests are critically important fish and wildlife habitat and are characterized by unique structural attributes (e.g., multi-layered canopies, diverse forb and shrub layers, abundant coarse-woody debris, and large diameter trees). Such high volume old-growth forests are important to wildlife because they contain relatively high levels of species richness, provide important winter refugia for birds and mammals, and support very abundant anadromous fish runs. Also of global importance is the capacity of these forests to store carbon and the subsequent role they play in regulating regional and global climates. Wilburforce concentrates its grants on conservation efforts in the following focal areas:
We are supporting the following organizations for work in this area. When you click on an organization name you will see a list of all grants made to that organization, which may include projects funded in other program areas. (Organizations receiving science-related grants are not included in this list. Please see our Conservation Science section for those grants.)
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