The focus: Private Forestland. All Forestland in the state is in one of two categories:
Public Owned.
Private Owned.
In the bigger picture Oregon Forestland, Public and Private, covers a large part of the state. A larger part of Western Oregon than Eastern Oregon. This is a forest ownership map:
http://oregonforests.org/content/forest-ownership-interactive-map
Flipping between the various owners, especially between public and large and small private owners displays concentrations of both categories. The area of my interest is Deschutes County which is not exactly identified but is approximated.
This chart (2015) displays the harvest of timber from public and private forestland:
http://oregonforests.org/node/24
This map displays Oregon forest by type of tree:
http://oregonforests.org/node/86
The prior three links are at Oregon Forest Research Institute. A non-government .org website that is funded by ?? A generous public that contributes money to support our forestland? A better question is who benefits the most from this generous support. ORFI would say everyone. The public environmentally. Private interests financially. The whole world is either public or private. OFRI is a single source described entity at Wikipedia as an educational organization. It obviously mixes public and private benefit. The linked information it presents is a general benefit.
OFRI presents this information for Deschutes County:
What amount of state tax is derived from this harvest?
It looks like the amount of state tax is insignificant. The purpose of the tax therefore is not the revenue derived from the taxation but the social and economic benefit to the public. What is the social and economic benefit value? Who benefits? Socially the benefit to the public is the preservation of forestland that is not cut and not cutting it gives various environmental benefits from clean air to recreation. Economic benefit is derived to 2,741 forest sector jobs being 4.6% of county employment in Deschutes County. Population was 175,258 in 2015. About 70,000 county residents are employed.
There is a factual basis to conclude that it takes a certain minimum amount of Forestland needed to derive any economic or social benefit or any significant relative degree of economic or social benefit. At the macro level according to the Dept of Forestry:
"Oregon's forests cover more than 30 million of the state's 63 million-acre land base, or about 48 percent of the state's total landmass. About 60 percent of all forestlands in Oregon are owned by the federal government.
