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Concerns about the fragmentation of Pacific Northwest forests are based on the assumption that these landscapes historically contained large, contiguous patches of old growth. However, this supposition appears to conflict with disturbance history research, which shows that wildfire was an important component of pre-settlement forest ecosystems. To better quantify historical forest patterns, a spatial simulation model of wildfire and forest succession was used to simulate pre-settlement landscape dynamics in the Oregon Coast Range, U.S.A. The model was parameterized to simulate fire regimes over 1000 years prior to Euro-American settlement using data from paleoecological, dendro ecological, and historical sources. A simple fire-spread algorithm produced mosaics of variable fire severity and allowed simulated fires to be calibrated to match the shapes of real fires. The simulated landscape was spatially …