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Of the many background sounds emitted in the forest -- birds tweeting, creeks gurgling, trees whispering -- one of them isn't ka-ching. But that could change any year now.

Oregon's Willamette National Forest ranks No. 1 in the nation in its quantum storage of carbon dioxide. And it is but one of 10 Northwest forests -- in Oregon, Washington and southeast Alaska -- that lead all federal forests in the United States in locking away the greenhouse gas.

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A federal judge has thrown out an industry lawsuit that could have led to more logging and road building in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, the nation's largest federal forest.

U.S. District Judge John Bates Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a timber group and an organization of Southeast Alaska civic and business leaders. The Southeast Conference and Alaska Forest Association had challenged a 2008 management plan for the Tongass developed by the Bush administration.

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A grapefruit-sized seabird that nests in Oregon's coastal forests is still declining and merits federal protection.

That is the result of a review of the marbled murrelet that reverses a 2004 determination by the Bush administration that the birds in California, Oregon and Washington were no different from their more numerous relatives in Canada and therefore not deserving of protection.

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The scientists said it was hard to predict how the changes would transform the Western landscape, although they anticipated that in the future the West will boast sparser forests that cannot store as much carbon as they do now, which could contribute to further warming.

"In the end, the forest will tend to equilibrate at a lower level of stored carbon," said Jerry F. Franklin, at the University of Washington's College of Forest Resources, noting that this will occur "over a very long time period."