Oregon has a strong rural character. It covers almost around 259 000 km2 and is heavily forested. The precise degree of rurality of the state varies depending on how it is measured; there are a number of ways to define rural and urban areas in the United States, including one methodology specific to Oregon (Crandall and Weber, 2005). Under the census system (which defines a place with 2 500 or more as urban and the rest rural) 99% of the land in Oregon is rural and this area is home to 31% of the inhabitants. The OMB1 and ERS2 system (based to some extent on census tracts and commuting patterns) better reflects the connections between rural and urban areas. In the county-based OMB approach the “non-core” counties have 38% of the land and 4% of the population while the tract-based ERS system counts 68% of the land and 10% of the population as rural. Thus, under the OMB and ERS approach “roughly 15% of the land area and three-fourths of the population lives in metropolitan areas” (Weber, 2005). The Oregon-specific geographic classification was created to reflect the diversity of rural areas, an aspect not well handled by the other systems (Crandall and Weber, 2005). In this latter approach, an urban community is one with 50 000 or more inhabitants and the surrounding area within 10 miles (16 kilometres) of these cities, and rural areas are those areas at least 30 miles (48 km) by road from an urban community.