"The Great Bear Rainforest is Canada's Amazon, and today's announcement is British Columbia's gift to the planet," said Merran Smith of the environmental group ForestEthics.

The deal, which will take until 2009 to fully implement, also gives the small native Indian nations in the area a greater say over what land should be protected or open to logging and resource development.

"It gives First Nations a comfort level that their cultural values will have as much weight as economic and ecological values now," said Dallas Smith, of the KNT First Nations, a coalition of several coastal Indian groups.

The Great Bear Rainforest region, along the Pacific coast from northern Vancouver Island to the southern end of the Alaska panhandle, contains some of the most dramatic scenery in North America with rugged mountains, coastal islands and few people.

Environmentalists coined the name Great Bear Rainforest in the 1990s as part of an international campaign that at one time included an international boycott of lumber products from British Columbia.

The boycott was suspended in 2001 when several green groups and forestry firms reached a tentative agreement to limit logging, and officials said the deal announced on Tuesday as an outgrowth of that earlier agreement.

The area is also home to a rare white-furred subspecies of the normally dark Kermode bear. Often called "spirit bears", the rare white animals have become poster bruins in the battle to protect the region.

In a Vancouver announcement that included native songs and dance to bless the deal, representatives of green groups and resource development supporters said both sides had done a lot to resolve their differences.

"Today we have an unprecedented collaboration," said BC Premier Gordon Campbell, whose government has committed C$30 million ($26 million) to help aid timber workers potentially displaced by the deal as well as local Indian groups.

Environmentalists also plan to create a C$120 million fund to support businesses such as eco-tourism.

Reynold Hert, chief executive of Western Forest Products Inc, the largest holder of logging licenses on the coast, said the agreement gives the timber industry clear rules on where and how they can log in the future.

The deal expands the total area protected against logging to about 1.8 million hectares (7,000 sq miles), and designates 200,000 hectares (770 sq miles) as special habitat for the spirit bears.

Campbell said native legends say the bears were created to remind people of the need to protect the land.

"Though this agreement, the spirit bear will forever continue to serve its purpose in the forest and valleys where it has always walked," Campbell said.

The province will enact the rules as part of a land use plan for the region. It will also look for additional funding from the federal government.