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This chapter focuses on Chile's forestry and viticulture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It details the successful cultivation of California's native Monterey pine (Pinus radiata) in Chile, making it the preeminent softwood in Chilean silviculture by the late twentieth century. It also describes the successive outbreaks of grape phylloxera (Daktulosphaira vitifoliae) that devastated California's wine industry, which destroyed so-called Old World grapevines (Vitis vinifera). The blight has never afflicted Chilean vineyards due to Chile's relative geographic isolation; a Chilean vintner's fortuitous importation of French rootstock just before Europe's first phylloxera outbreak in the 1860s; and a series of botanical quarantine policies that protected Chile's vineyards from the microscopic pest.

This chapter describes the Central Coast bioregion, which include coastal valleys and mountains and interior mountains. Major ecological zones include: coastal prairie and coastal sage scrub, coast redwood-Douglas-fir and coast redwood-mixed evergreen forests, and chaparral and oak woodland. The chapter outlines the ecology of several species and community types that, with the exception of coast live oak, are characteristic of the region but are relatively localized. In the coastal plain and foothills zone, the chapter reviews Bishop pine, Monterey pine, maritime chaparral, and coastal live oak forests and woodlands. Of the many species and community types characteristic of the lower montane zone, knobcone pine and Sargent cypress are discussed. It then evaluates the four important management issues that face fire and natural resource managers in the Central Coast bioregion, notably: climate change, fire and exotic species, the management of fire-dependent species, and fire management at the wildland-urban interface.

This chapter discusses how Chilean ships and wheat provided the literal foundations for San Francisco's territorial and demographic expansions during the mid-1800s. Beginning in 1848, the city's developers converted nearly all of Chile's merchant fleet into waterfront structures, initiating a process known as landmaking. These ships ended up as anchor points in an intricate network of wharves, earthen fill, foundation piles, and gangplanks. Wheat from Chile also fed the city's burgeoning population. During the mid-1800s, merchants sold 72,575 metric tons of Chilean wheat flour to the city's newcomers. This boom in wheat exports triggered profound agrarian changes in Chile, including the clearing of hundreds of thousands of acres of native forest in Chile's south-central provinces to open land for wheat cultivation. This change in traditional land-use patterns exposed these regions to swift colonization by Monterey pines during the twentieth century.