Editing Pacific Northwest (section)

===Ecoregions===
[[File:Cascades panorama from the upper meadow below Park Butte.jpg|thumb|The Cascades range]]
Much of the Pacific Northwest is forested. The [[Georgia Strait]]–[[Puget Sound]] basin is shared between western British Columbia and Washington, and the [[Pacific temperate rain forests]] ecoregion, which is the largest of the world's [[temperate rain forest]] [[ecoregion]]s in the system created by the [[World Wildlife Fund]], stretches along the coast from Alaska to California. The dry desert inland from the [[Cascade Range]] and [[Coast Mountains]] is very different from the terrain and climate of the coastal area due to the [[rain shadow effect]] of the mountains, and comprises the Columbia, Fraser and Thompson Plateaus and mountain ranges contained within them. The interior regions' climates largely within Eastern Washington, south central British Columbia, Eastern Oregon, and southern Idaho are a part of the [[Great Basin Desert]], although by their northern and eastern reaches, dry land and desert areas verge at the end of the Cascades' and [[Coast Mountains]]' [[rain shadow]]s with the boreal forest and various [[Alpine tundra|alpine flora regimes]] characteristic of eastern British Columbia, the [[Idaho Panhandle]] and western [[Montana]] roughly along a longitudinal line defined by the Idaho border with Washington and Oregon. The [[North American inland temperate rainforest]] is in the so-called interior wet-belt, approximately 500–700&nbsp;km inland from the Pacific coast on western, windward mountain slopes and valley bottoms of the [[Columbia Mountains]] and the [[Rocky Mountains]]. The interior wet-belt refers to a discontinuous band of humid forest patches, that are scattered over 1000&nbsp;km between [[Purden Lake Provincial Park|Purden Lake]] in Canada's [[British Columbia]] (54° North) and Montana and Idaho's [[Bitterroot Mountains]] and Idaho's [[Salmon River Mountains]] (45° North).<ref>Goward, Trevor; Spribille, Toby (2005). "Lichenological evidence for the recognition of inland rain forests in western North America". Journal of Biogeography. 32 (7): 1209-2010.</ref> It is closely associated with the [[North Central Rockies forests]] [[ecoregion]] designated by the [[World Wildlife Fund|WWF]], which extends over a similar range but incorporates various non-temperate rainforest ecosystems.