I was browsing Google Earth and I noticed this. Clearly man-made, the squares are exactly 1 mile on each side. My guess was some sort of allotments for logging companies, designed to not completely destroy the forest but rather preserve some level of density. It's definitely NOT an imaging thing, zoom in on it and you'll see. This pic is about 25 miles southwest of Eugene, OR. You can't miss it.

Can anybody confirm this?

Shhh! You'll ruin everything!

Firebreaks?

Notice how they're a grid square to the image itself?

It's almost certainly an effect of google maps joining several images together. I'd guess it takes images in mile square segments and joins them together. The colour variation between treens spanning several blocks would imho indicate lighting level changes during the day while the pictures were being taken.

There's also cloud shadow which accounts for colour variation.

Nope that's definitely the way the forest is. The reason they are in a line with the image is that they are laid out along north south / east west lines.

Forest Management. It's probably a national forest, and you're correct- rather than cutting large chunks of it at once, they cut bits and pieces of it here and there. All the white squiggly lines are the access roads.

These days, forests are run a lot like farms, with trees as the crops. Only, instead of a yearly rotation like with farm crops, you've got rotation lengths of 40-50 years or more (in some cases, 100+ years even!). When the trees are harvested, they are harvested in such a way so as not to ensure that future crops of trees will grow successfully, providing for a sustainable yield.

Wow if every answer were like that one then we could solve all problems

That image bothers me. I mean they might as well leave dflt.mat all over if they're not gonna bother making it tile.

Maybe taken during different times? I see similar things in my area where you can tell certain grids are pictures from spring, certain from winter.

There wouldn't be a 1x1 mile grid discrepancy in capture dates though... not in this pattern.

The answer has already been posted!

Here's a picture (also from oregon) that shows what these kinds of forestry practices normally look like. It's not usually done on a grid system like in the original picture but I've heard of it being done this way before. A little bit of the forest gets harvested each year, resulting in a patchwork look. That way, there is a constant and steady supply of timber every year, and the ecosystem remains intact as well. It's both economically and environmentally sustainable!

Also, just noticed that the original picture is not of a National Forest, which makes more sense. Usually, the government puts a bit more effort into making timber harvesting operations more aesthetically pleasing (well, a bit less of an eye-rape at least) than private timber companies do. Mainly because the government is not only managing for timber, but recreation as well.

Also, here's a close up of one of the straight edges to show that it exists in real life, and is not a product of photo-mosaic-ing. The strip of trees running up the middle of the clearcut area line a stream, those trees were left behind to protect the stream ecosystem.

Not really. The woods grow back, and quite quickly at that. Deforestation is a product of urbanization, not forest management and timber harvesting.

In fact, different harvest techniques (including clearcuts) are selected because of how they influence forest regeneration. When harvesting timber, the main concern is what will grow there afterward. In the forestry profession, deforestation is not economically profitable anymore.

I think that's why he called it ECOdeforestation, instead of deforestation... not sayin' it makes sense, but...

This thread title reminds me of the time governor Phil Batt of Idaho took a helicopter ride over some national forests in Idaho and expressed his dismay over why all the south-facing hillsides were treeless while the north-facing hillsides were covered, promising funding to vegetate them.

Yeah, that was a pretty /facepalm moment.