When Bay Nature was born 25 years ago, the greater Bay Area stood at a tipping point. Environmental movements of the 1970s had galvanized a core group of people committed to bringing nature back. Thanks to key achievements—the Clean Water Act, the founding of land trusts, new state and federal funding—stinking landfills became parks, and areas once slated for bulldozing were protected.
Now environmental groups had to do something with the places they had saved. “It went from ‘You’re not going to develop this’ to ‘We’re going to restore this,’” says David Loeb, who cofounded Bay Nature with Malcolm Margolin and was its publisher and editor in chief for 17 years. After news-grabbing purchases come far less glamorous years of developing restoration blueprints, applying for permits, cleaning up trash, and rearing native plants. Meanwhile the threats to nature have grown and changed, Loeb says. Development continues to encroach upon natural areas, but climate change now drives much of the restoration work. New invasive species are always arriving. Yet many places have been transformed for the better, and more people are invested in local nature. “It’s not just a specialized cadre,” Loeb says. “You have a whole ecosystem of people now.”
Here, we show what change looks like at four sites around the Bay Area, chosen with help from the Bay Nature community, and highlight notable themes and trends in local restoration over this past quarter century: Sausal Creek, Crissy Field, Sears Point, and Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve. Often these projects began with a seed—someone hoping to fix one small problem—that sprouted into something much bigger.
Saving the Bay
Over the past 25 years, conservationists have made striking progress toward a goal of protecting half of the San Francisco Bay Area’s lands by 2050. And don’t forget the water, great swaths of which are now covered by federal or state protections.
441,551
more acres of Bay Area lands protected since 2002
90+
federally and state-listed species with critical habitat here
3.5
intermediate est. feet of sea level rise for S.F., 2000–2100
1. Unburied Waters
EAST BAY
Sausal Creek
A formerly domesticated creek flows free in Oakland.
The Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people knew the East Bay’s creeks as living beings—waters that flowed from the hills, across redwood forest and chaparral and willow stands, to the mudflats and the Bay. But 19th- and 20th-century settlers in the new city of Oakland blocked or buried many of the waters—taming the unruly torrents of creeks like Sausal Creek, which starts in the hills above the Dimond District and runs through Fruitvale. Sausal Creek was dammed, concreted, and abandoned. In some places, the stream that once nourished willows and rainbow trout disappeared altogether, in well-meant Works Progress Administration projects.
778
miles of Bay Area streams protected, as of 2024
Then the creek got a little help from its friends—specifically, the Friends of Sausal Creek, which formed in 1996 to plant native species along the waterway’s banks as the city removed a nearby sewer line. Since then, the group has expanded into a nonprofit that stewards the watershed in all its wanderings. From 2012 to 2016, Friends of Sausal Creek helped unearth the creek from underneath a manicured lawn in Dimond Park. Today, the creek flows in dappled sunlight—supporting rainbow trout, dense willows, and children who splash through the water.
Friends of Sausal Creek volunteers have given hundreds of thousands of hours of work to clean, replant, and protect the creek over the years, and the work goes on—beating back invasive ivy, growing native plants, and cleaning up areas in the lower watershed that people are still treating as a dump site. Says Kate Berlin, the development and engagement manager for Friends of Sausal Creek: “It’s about letting folks know somebody cares about this space.”
For 77 years, Sausal Creek was confined to a culvert running under this grass at Dimond Park. Michael Thilgen
2. A New Park Takes Flight
SAN FRANCISCO
Crissy Field
An iconic park that was once a military airstrip.
When Lewis Stringer began work at the abandoned military airstrip overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge in 1997, it was a “derelict concrete wasteland,” according to the National Park Service. Stringer supervised AmeriCorps members as they pulled invasive ice plants and planted native species. Thousands of volunteers helped. Soon, one of the biggest urban restoration projects the United States had ever seen, and the largest philanthropic gift NPS had ever received, would transform Crissy Field.
From the concrete, the park service and the nonprofit Golden Gate National Parks Association (now the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy) unearthed Crissy Field’s long-lost salt marsh and lagoon. Stringer returned in the 2000s to “restring the necklace” of the marsh’s watershed, as he put it—restoring a few acres of wetland at a time, all the way to El Polín Spring.
Center. Kirke Wrench; courtesy of Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy / National Park Service
Today, you can walk from the spring to the lagoon through a natural corridor also frequented by invertebrates and lizards. Stringer, now associate director of natural resources at the Presidio Trust, has spent almost three decades at the Presidio. During this time he has seen the restoration of 60 acres of watershed, supported by wetland mitigation funds, the Presidio Trust, and GGNPC—which has now raised among the most money of any NPS partner agency. Around 40 acres have yet to be restored.
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The public-private partnership that sustains Crissy Field has its ups and downs. President Donald J. Trump’s administration has targeted the Presidio, and Republicans in Congress briefly challenged $200 million of Inflation Reduction Act funding meant for a long-needed park infrastructure upgrade. And since Crissy Field falls under NPS management, parking there got harder when the government shut down in 2025.
234
bird species recorded in Crissy Field’s lagoon
Even so, you could and still can experience on foot how far Crissy Field has come from its concrete past. Walk the long marsh-lined beach, and see birders who have come for the thousands of birds that stop here, runners relishing the long, flat trails, picnickers enjoying the Golden Gate views, and others—a decades-old vision come to life.
3. After the Flood
NORTH BAY
Sears Point
The fish are back.
Now comes the hard, slow work of rebuilding a marsh.
As conservationists let water back into Sears Point in October 2015 for the first time in more than a century, nature came with it. Within weeks, somebody photographed a seal with a striped bass clenched in its jaws, swimming over this 1,000-acre area that had been farmland not too long ago.
It is one of many such projects across the Bay, returning the tides to places where levees had once barred the waters and restoring baylands on the scale of landscapes. The levee breach is the most dramatic moment—but it is just one milestone on the long, muddy journey back to becoming a tidal marsh.
80+%
Bay Area wetlands destroyed since European settlement
53%
progress so far towards 100,000-acre tidal wetland restoration goal
Projects build on each other. The neighboring Sonoma Baylands were flooded to restore wetlands in 1996. When Sonoma Land Trust acquired Sears Point in 2004, it looked at what had worked—and what hadn’t—next door. The land trust spent a decade permitting and planning the larger levee breach, dotting the basin with 500 mounds of sediment to help restoration along.
17,500
more acres of tidal wetland in the Bay Area since 1998
Now lessons from Sears Point guide even bigger restoration projects. As sea levels rise, wetland restorers must adapt. “All the work we’re doing now just has to be done so much faster,” says Julian Meisler, associate stewardship director at Sonoma Land Trust. “We’re in a race against time.”
Sears Point is still changing. Every tide washes in sediment that helps rebuild the marsh a little more. Soon, there will be enough of the stuff for pickleweed to gain a toehold. The endangered salt marsh harvest mice that depend upon it may find a new place to raise their babies. Already other wildlife have joined the seals: avocets, bat rays, and even an occasional wandering salmon.
4. The Stewards Return
SANTA CRUZ AREA
Quiroste Valley
Smoke curls again over the Santa Cruz Mountains, and grasslands return.
Valentin Lopez, former chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, remembers how Quiroste Valley felt the first time he visited, in 2006: “Very much forested.” Douglas firs grew in dense stands, with invasive grasses dominating open patches. Along the creeks, thick-trunked redwoods remained—survivors of the clear-cutting across the Santa Cruz Mountains, remnants of a very different Quiroste.
<2%
native grasslands remaining in California
An immense coastal prairie had once covered most of the valley, which the Quiroste tribe maintained by burning there every seven to ten years, according to Lopez. (Though there are no known descendants of the Quiroste people, the Amah Mutsun trace their lineage to this region.) Lopez and other tribal members started talking about bringing back the prairie. In 2008, the state designated the valley a cultural preserve within Año Nuevo State Park. It was likely the first such partnership between an unrecognized tribe and State Parks, and it brought back tribal stewardship to the valley in perpetuity.
historical research. Hylkema and Cuthrell 2013
Since then, State Parks and the Amah Mutsun Land Trust’s Native Stewardship Corps have cleared over 4,000 Douglas firs and countless stands of poison hemlock. They have set fire to the cleared firs, propagated over a quarter million native plants, and scattered seeds amid the 400 burn scars. Today, while standing amid native purple needlegrass, one can see the sky and the sea from places once overwhelmed by Douglas fir.
140
invasive plant species threatening the region’s grasslands
Coastal prairies are particularly biodiverse ecosystems. George Chrisman via iNaturalist, CC-BY-NC.
“But there’s a lot of things that are invisible,” says Mark Hylkema, a retired State Parks archaeologist, who has studied Quiroste Valley since the 1980s. “Like the restoration of tribal identity and pride.” The Amah Mutsun’s work here kick-started partnerships and conversations with other agencies and land trusts—especially when the CZU Fire of 2020, which burned to the valley’s edge, underscored for many how lost tribal stewardship put landscapes at stake.
The tribe and State Parks are now planning the first cultural burn here, perhaps for 2026. The fire spreading across the land will be the next step in Quiroste’s long restoration. “We say it took seven, eight, nine generations to get to the condition it is today,” says Lopez. “It’s going to take seven, eight, nine generations to get back.”
