<p>Understanding historical disturbance patterns is important for silviculture. In temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest silviculture principles have been constructed from disturbance models that have emphasized long multi-century intervals between large, stand replacing disturbances. Recent research highlights the additional influence of historical small-scale disturbances, including non-stand replacing (NSR) fires. These disturbances were frequent, patchy, and provided high variability in stand development at smaller scales. We suggest expanding the discussion about disturbances to reflect the variety of NSR disturbance impacts on stand development as a way to tie silvicultural practices to landscape patterns. A new framework that includes the full suite of stand development models can provide the conceptual basis for applications of silviculture and restoration treatments. In addition, separating disturbance impacts on canopy trees, understory vegetation including tree regeneration, as well as forest floor conditions may be helpful to reframe stand development patterns and outcomes, especially in the context of efficient provision of a variety of stand structure components. We provide suggestions on how to integrate these elements into silvicultural treatments and propose to utilize the full range of stand development models for silviculture prescriptions within and among stands. Such a bottom-up approach may be especially useful in times of global change, where the treatments can encourage development of diverse, resilient forests with potential to address a wide variety of social and ecological challenges.</p>