View article

Modern ecology often emphasizes the distinction between traditional theories of stable, environmentally structured communities and a new paradigm of disturbance‐driven, nonequilibrium dynamics. However, multiple hypotheses for observed vegetation patterns have seldom been explicitly tested. We used multivariate statistics and variation partitioning methods to assess the relative influences of environmental factors and disturbance history on riparian and hillslope forests. Our study area was the Cummins Creek Wilderness, located in the Oregon Coast Range. Most of the wilderness burned at least once between the mid‐19th and early 20th centuries, creating a mosaic of younger forests with a few old‐growth patches. Species composition on hillslopes varied primarily along a climatic gradient from moist maritime environments to drier inland climates but was relatively insensitive to forest age structure. The …