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.
The looming bulk of Mount Hamilton is a familiar sight to anyone driving Highway 101 through the Santa Clara Valley. At 4,196 feet, it's the tallest peak visible from the shores of San Francisco Bay. This is the most expansive wild landscape in the Bay Area: roughly 700,000 acres of public parks, university and conservancy reserves, and private ranches. Now it's also become a living laboratory for studying the affects of climate change.
Maybe you take the bus to work or abandon the gas pedal on Bike to Work Day, but how do you know whether you and your neighbors are making a difference in your community?
Mike Hamilton, director of the Blue Oak Ranch Reserve on Mount Hamilton, describes himself as a "digital naturalist." He's wired the reserve's 3,260 acres with sensors, sent up drone helicopters, and even set up a "Robosquirrel" in an effort to find out how climate change is impacting the region's ecosystem.
What better place than at school to get going on solar? The HELiOS project is making it happen for Bay Area schools.
Ellie Cohen became president and CEO of what is now PRBO Conservation Science in 1999. Under her leadership, the organization has grown from the local Point Reyes Bird Observatory, founded in 1965, to a hemisphere-scale operation, conducting bird-focused applied ecosystem studies on land and at sea. PRBO uses its wealth of data and partnerships to assess and reduce the impacts of changes in climate and land use on ecosystem health.
A project in West Marin shows how ranchers, and a whole lot of compost, can help mitigate climate change.
New artificial islands at Oakland’s Arrowhead Marsh provide some welcome refuge for endangered clapper rails. But can they be expanded into enough other habitats to keep the birds safe from rising sea levels?
To launch our new series on climate change in the Bay Area, we follow a group of researchers as they scan the bottom, poke the mud, and gauge the tides at Marin's Corte Madera Marsh, in the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary effort to understand how the Bay Area's tidal wetlands will respond to rising sea levels.
As I write this on Thanksgiving weekend, I have many things to be grateful for. For example: On Thanksgiving morning, I watched a huge raft of cormorants take off from the surface of the Bay in front of Angel Island. But behind such moments and places of great beauty, several dark clouds are gathering.
Global climate models are critical to understanding climate change, but they don't tell us anything about changing temperatures and other surface level changes in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is what we need to know to plan for our future. A new model for the North Bay creates a closeup view critical for watershed managers. And soon the model will expand to cover all of California, 18 acres at a time.
Independent, nonprofit environmental journalism connecting people with nature in the San Francisco Bay Area.
