Whatcom Land · Harvests around us

How a harvest works

Filing. A landowner, or a forester working for them, files a Forest Practices Application with the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR). It describes the area, the harvest method, any new roads, and how streams and steep slopes will be protected.
Review. DNR reviews it. For the permits on this map, approval came about a month after filing (the typical time). That mostly reflects the legal clock: lower-impact work (Class II) is a notification that can proceed after a few days; standard applications (Class III) are decided within 30 days; sites with sensitive slopes or habitat get extra environmental review (Class IV-Special).
The permit window. Most approvals last three years; some long-term permits for small forest owners last up to 15. Cutting can happen any time in that window: all at once, in stages, or sometimes not at all. So a shape on this map means approved, not necessarily cut yet.
After the harvest. Washington requires replanting after a clearcut, and after a partial cut that removes half or more of the timber; a clearcut must be satisfactorily restocked within three years, at about 190 young trees per acre in western Washington (WAC 222-34-010). The exception is conversion (Class IV-General): land that is leaving forestry, for example for homes or farms, doesn't have to be replanted. These are outlined with a dashed line on the map.
Regrowth. Forests here grow fast. Industrial forests are typically harvested again after roughly 35–45 years; state trust forests often after 50–70 or more; small owners vary.
Inside a unit. A harvest unit's acres aren't all cut: streams keep buffers of trees, and wildlife trees and logs are left by rule. So "acres in harvest units" is more than the area actually cleared.

Types of harvest

These are DNR's categories. Even-aged and uneven-aged are harvest methods, defined by how many trees are left standing per acre; the definitions come from state rules (WAC 222-16-010).

Even-aged harvest (mostly clearcuts): Removes most or all of the trees at once, so the new forest grows back all one age. Mostly clearcuts ("the entire stand of trees is removed in one timber harvesting operation"), but the state's definition also covers seed-tree and shelterwood cuts that leave 20 or fewer trees per acre, and other cuts leaving very few trees. The most common type here.
Partial cut or thinning (uneven-aged): Removes some of the trees and leaves at least 50 healthy trees per acre standing. In western Washington this is usually thinning of a younger plantation, so the trees left are often all one age, and 50 per acre is an open stand: more like a thinned forest than an untouched one.
Salvage: Removal of dead, dying, damaged or downed trees, for example after wind, insects, disease or fire. "Salvage" is the applicant's label: a salvage unit can be large and look much like a clearcut on the ground.
Road right-of-way: Clearing for a forest road, usually alongside another harvest.

Has it been cut yet?

A shape on this map is an approval, not a harvest. To see what happened on the ground, each clearcut and salvage unit is checked against two satellite records. Pick cut yet? under "Color by", or tap a unit. Under Past years, Year cut replays the harvests by the year the trees came down instead of the year the permit was filed.

When the trees came down comes from the University of Maryland's Global Forest Change map, which marks each 30-metre square of land with the year Landsat saw its tree cover removed, now through 2025. A unit counts as half or more cleared when at least half its squares lost their trees in or after the year the application was filed, and as having some tree loss at 10–50%. A unit whose trees had already come down in the five years before the filing is marked already cleared before this permit.
This year so far comes from NASA's OPERA disturbance alerts, which compare each new Landsat and Sentinel-2 image with the years before and flag vegetation loss within days. Only losses seen in several images count, dated after 2025 and on or after the day the application was filed; the same half and 10% rules apply. Units with no confirmed loss read no clearing seen through the date of the latest images.
A second look comes from Vibrant Planet's estimate of standing commercial timber in summer 2024, made from Sentinel-2 images. Where it still shows a full forest on a unit Landsat calls cleared before 2024, or open ground Landsat didn't catch, the unit is marked unclear. The two agree on most units: of the units the timber estimate shows as open, 96% also show tree loss on Landsat.
Not every acre in a unit is cut. Stream buffers and leave trees stay standing by rule, so a cleared unit is rarely 100% bare.
Checked against aerial photos. For 50 randomly chosen Whatcom units filed 2013–2021, USDA aerial photos from before, a few years after, and 2023 were compared by eye, without knowing the satellite status. All 15 marked no clearing seen were still forested. Of 15 marked half or more cleared, 13 showed clearing on at least part of the unit. Some tree loss is the least certain: half of those units showed no visible clearing in the photos (thinning, a new road, or a ragged edge can register as loss). For this year's alerts, Sentinel-2 images of summer 2025 and September 2026 were compared the same way for every Whatcom unit the alerts flagged and 12 they didn't: every flagged unit showed new clearing, and 9 of the 12 others were still forested (the other three showed small clearings, or couldn't be told).
Not checked: partial cuts and thinning (they leave much of the forest standing, which these records can't reliably see), road work, and units under about an acre.
No clearing seen can mean the permit ran out unused, the cut is still to come, or the work was light enough that the trees still read as forest from space.

What a harvest looks like

Aerial photos of three Whatcom County clearcuts before the cut, just after, and about eight years later, and satellite images of one cut this year. The yellow line is the harvest unit DNR approved.

How these were chosen: clearcut units of 15–150 acres that satellites show cleared in 2012–15, on state trust land or a large forest owner's land only (small forest landowners' land is never featured). Fifteen were drawn at random; these three are typical and clear in every photo. Regrowth varies: one unit among the fifteen was still mostly bare eight years after its cut. Photos: USDA NAIP (public domain); satellite images: Copernicus Sentinel-2 (contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025–26).

What this map doesn't show

Herbicide spraying. Spraying after harvest is common on industrial land, but DNR doesn't record it in its mapped data (only in unmapped, section-level records), so this map is silent on it.
Applications DNR never mapped. Many applications exist only as section-level entries in DNR's data, without a mapped shape, so they can't appear here.
Federal and tribal land. National forest, national park and tribal trust land are managed outside DNR's permit system.

Who owns the land

Types of owner

Washington sorts private forest owners by how much timber they harvest, not by how much land they own. The line is set in state law (RCW 76.09.450): 2 million board feet a year. (A board foot is a piece of wood one foot square and one inch thick.)

Small forest owners: Owners who harvested no more than an average of 2 million board feet a year over the previous three years, and who expect to stay under that average for the next ten. This is the state's "small forest landowner" category, recorded on each application. It's about harvest, not land or business size: some are sizable local companies, but most are families and local owners, often our neighbors. That's why this page doesn't name them. Each harvest on the map links to DNR's own record, which does.
Large forest owners: Private owners above that line: more than 2 million board feet a year on average. Mostly timber companies. (The state has no single name for this group; "large forest owners" is this site's.) The largest here: ….
State land (DNR): Forest land managed by the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) as trust land. Some is State Forest land held in trust for the county: its timber revenue goes to the county and local districts such as roads, fire and libraries. Other parcels fund school construction and universities statewide.
Owner not listed: DNR's data has no landowner recorded for these applications.

Largest named owners

Harvest areas, not whole properties. A landowner owns the land; the timber owner owns the trees (often the same company); the operator does the cutting.

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