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Tongass Forest Facts

• The Tongass National Forest spans 16,883,000 (17 million) acres.

• There are 5,721,733 (5.7 million) acres within the Tongass National Forest that are Congressionally designated Wilderness Areas and National Monuments. That accounts for 34% of the Tongass. No logging is allowed in these areas.

• For each acre of the Tongass that is managed for timber production, there are 8.5 acres of land designated by Congress as Wilderness. This land can never be logged.

• There are 9,933,000 (9.9 million) forested acres in the Tongass and 6,949,000 (6.9) acres of the Tongass are not forested. That means 58% of the Tongass is covered by trees and 41% is covered by rock, glaciers, water, etc.

• Of the 9.9 million acres of trees on the Tongass there are 4,233,455 (4.2 million) acres that have been deemed by the land manager, the Forest Service, "non productive" timber lands. So 43% of the forested acres on the Tongass are "non-productive" which means they are either lands not capable of growing commercial wood, or land physically unsuitable for reasons such as steep slopes, some land has not yet been evaluated, and some land has been withdrawn from land use designations allowing timber harvest.

• The remaining forested acres comprise the area where timber harvest may be planned. There is 3,700,000 million acres in the "commercial forest" of the Tongass. That accounts for 37% of the forested acres of the Tongass, or 22% of the entire Tongass.

• The Tongass Land Management Plan revised in 1997 plans to harvest timber from 676,000 acres from the commercial forest of the Tongass over a 100 year rotation. That means that less than 10% the forests in the Tongass will be cut in the next 100 years - a mere 4% of the entire Tongass is available for timber management, which means there’s 96% left for many other uses

• The Tongass is roughly the size of the entire state of West Virginia.

• The current status of fisheries resources on the Tongass is unequaled anywhere in the world.

• The combined Southeast Alaska fish habitat and harvest goals set by fisheries biologists in the late 1980’s for the year 2000 have already been surpassed by 145 percent.

• The new Tongass Land Management Plan provides for maintaining deer habitat capability sufficient to sustain wolf populations and current levels of human deer use.

• The importance of the beach and estuary buffers to a variety of ecological functions is well established. The current TLMP establishes 1,000 foot no harvest zones along beaches and estuaries to protect important habitat for deer, goshawks, marten, brown bear and bald eagles. The 1,000 foot no harvest zone along the coastline is in addition to the millions of acres of forested lands in Wilderness and Habitat Conservation Areas, where no logging is allowed.

• When President Theodore Roosevelt created the Tongass National Forest in 1907 he did so with the utmost wisdom.  Roosevelt was way ahead of his time, recognizing as early as 1903 the importance of multiple use. "...First and foremost," President Roosevelt explained, "you can never afford to forget for a moment what is the object of our forest policy. That is not to preserve the forests because they are beautiful, though that is good in itself, nor because they are refuges for the wild creatures of the wilderness, thought that too is good in itself; but the primary object of our forest policy, as the land policy of the United States, is the making of prosperous homes."

• Of the 9.9 million forested acres in the Tongass, 8.3 million will remain closed to timber access and harvest. Under the current TLMP this is correct. However, this number could change and not all areas within that 8.3 million acres are permanently protected from timber harvest activities.

• It’s a tricky thing to talk about how much forest land is "unavailable." It is tricky because its definition varies. That number may or may not include all sorts of different factors.

• There are 731,000 acres identified in TLMP as suitable for scheduling the expected 676,000 acres of harvest over the next 100 years (rotation). That’s less than 1% of the forested acres of the Tongass.