10-year Reassessment of Streams in the Coyote Creek Watershed

SFEI and the Santa Clara Valley Water District just completed a report characterizing the amount, diversity, and distribution of aquatic resources in the Coyote Creek watershed, and the overall ecological conditions of streams in the watershed. The 2020 ambient stream condition reassessment survey used a watershed approach and the California Rapid Assessment Method (or CRAM) to compare the amount of stream miles in good, fair, and poor condition among the Hills and Valley regions as well as differences between a 2010 baseline survey and the 2020 reassessment.

Big updates from Hidden Nature SF, including new interactive content!

Hidden Nature SF seeks to uncover the natural history of San Francisco’s past landscape. At the heart of the project is the field of historical ecology, which uses interdisciplinary science and visualization techniques to synthesize historical archival data into a completely new perspective on the familiar city. Drawing on hundreds of old maps, photographs, and textual documents, we are reconstructing and mapping the ecosystems and waterways that existed in San Francisco prior to Spanish colonization.

New article published in Nature Sustainability linking COVID-19 to nature equity, showing communities of color face starkest burden

Erica Spotswood and a team of scientists published pioneering research in Nature Sustainability, finding that COVID-19 tracks neighborhood greenness in the US, exacerbating existing inequity. The study, titled “Nature inequity and higher COVID-19 case rates in less green neighbourhoods in the United States,” demonstrates a fundamental pattern that low-income and majority-minority communities systematically have less access to nature in urban areas across the U.S.

"Nature inequity and higher COVID-19 case rates in less green neighbourhoods in the United States," Nature Sustainability

This dataset includes all replication materials for Spotswood et al. 2021 ‘Nature inequity and higher COVID-19 case rates in less green neighbourhoods in the United States’. The materials allow users to reproduce analyses, figures, and calculations appearing the main text and extended data of the paper. This site hosts ArcGIS shapefiles with all relevant data and R code to reproduce all analyses and figures. See manuscript methods for further details for data preparation and sources.  

RMP Annual Meeting

The 28th RMP Annual Meeting was hosted on Thursday, October 14th, 2021. Fully virtual for the second year, the meeting included an excellent lineup with presentations from RMP staff and other invited experts.  We heard about and discussed findings on Bay sediment supply, PFAS, tire particles and chemicals, and contaminants in Bay fish, among other topics. If you missed the meeting or any specific sessions, recordings of the meeting and presenter slides will be posted below shortly

SFEI Experts Assist California’s Safer Consumer Products Program

Recent studies by the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) and the Regional Monitoring Program (RMP) have pinpointed chemical and microplastic contamination from tires as a rising concern in the Bay.  Tire ingredients of interest include zinc, which has many documented adverse health effects in wildlife, and 6PPD, a preservative

Adaptation Atlas Data

This dataset is an ArcGIS map package containing the Operational Landscape Units and nature-based shoreline adaptation opportunities described in the San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas. The map package includes the following layers:

Sediment for Survival report released

SFEI worked with local, state, and federal science experts to develop the new Sediment for Survival report. The report provides a regional sediment strategy aimed at examining the future of sediment in the Bay and informing sediment management for the resilience of tidal marshes and tidal flats to climate change.

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