Climate change is dramatically altering the San Francisco Bay Area’s ecosystems and raising profound questions among conservationists about how to help species best adapt to new conditions.
It’s not “news” to Bay Nature readers that climate change is in the process of giving a serious thwack to living systems. But what’s less well understood is how plants and animals and the habitats they inhabit are moving—and being altered—in response to changing temperature and precipitation patterns.
On the last weekend of March, 9,000 people armed with binoculars, butterfly nets, cameras, and smartphones, spread out over an archipelago of national park lands from Point Reyes in Marin County to Mori Point on the San Mateo coast. Their … Read more
The beauty of science is that it really does search for truth. It is easy to follow the tracks and trails of one or several of nature’s patterns and yet be completely lost as to the whole picture.
Humboldt Squid have moved into and out of California, sometimes for years at a time, for centuries. Now an El Niño approaches the Pacific Coast, and squid researchers are waiting.
An expert in rare plants, Heath Bartosh is especially interested in “fire followers,” plants whose seeds stay buried in the ground until heat or smoke stimulates germination. These annuals flourish for one to three years. And then they’re gone—until the next fire.
The Galapagos damselfish exists only in the specimens collection at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the victim of an unusually strong El Nino. Thoughts on the fish, and its lessons in a changing world.
A few years ago the State Coastal Conservancy went looking for something new: habitat restoration that would also address sea level rise. Two years into a pilot experiment, the results suggest that in the appropriate places this green climate adaptation might work.
Black rails are one of the most secretive of birds. But new research is showing that the scurrying marshland species can pick up and move if it must.
National Park Service ecologist Sarah Allen has been looking at the “big picture” of marine ecosystem health since the mid-1970s when she worked as a field biologist on the Farallon Islands, then later in the ’80s and ’90s tracking seabirds, … Read more
The forecast calls for big rain this weekend from an "atmospheric river," a plume of moisture stretching thousands of miles across the Pacific and splashing onto land right smack on the Northern California coast.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
