Lauren Stoneburner

The largest brackish marsh on the West Coast, Suisun Marsh is a unique transitional landscape between San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Marsh supports high ecological diversity and has long been managed for recreational hunting and native species support, yet it is threatened by an uncertain future under climate change. Effective adaptation in Suisun will require coordinated, science-based planning by agencies and private landowners.

This study focuses on a segment of the Santa Ana River Parkway in and around the City of Riverside, where multiple habitat restoration projects are underway.

Hidden Nature SF brings a new perspective to our view of San Francisco, studying the city’s historical ecology in order to engage the public in re-imagining San Francisco’s ecological past, present, and future.

DARI is the Delta Aquatic Resources Inventory of surface waters, wetlands and other aquatic resources in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Delta). The goal of the DARI project is to develop a geospatial inventory of aquatic resources that will be used as a common base map for the Delta. A similar mapping approach used to create the California Aquatic Resource Inventory (CARI) will be applied to provide a map of the aquatic resources and their associated attributes.

SFEI is working with partners across the Bay Area to design tools to help cities achieve biodiversity, stormwater, and climate benefits through multifunctional green infrastructure.

In partnership with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Urban Alliance, the San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI) has developed the Making Nature’s City Toolkit

Making Nature’s City Toolkit (makingnaturescity.org) is an interactive, beautifully designed website that guides cities through an actionable, science-based approach to support biodiversity in cities. Based on SFEI’s 2019 report titled Making Nature’s City, the Toolkit is intended to make the report’s core urban biodiversity framework more accessible to actors and decision-makers in cities across the world. 

SFEI is partnering with the City of East Palo Alto, the urban forestry non-profit Canopy, and HortScience | Bartlett Consulting to develop an Urban Forest Master Plan for the city.

The Delta Aquatic Resource Inventory (DARI) is a map of surface waters, wetlands and other aquatic resources in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. A similar mapping approach used to create the Bay Area Aquatic Resource Inventory (BAARI) was applied to complete a consistent map across the larger San Francisco Estuary. Both DARI and BAARI are integrated into the California Aquatic Resource Inventory (CARI), which serves as the basemap in EcoAtlas.

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.

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.

Nestled in the rugged coastal mountains between San Francisco and Silicon Valley lies one of the ecological treasures of the San Francisco Bay Area: the Peninsula Watershed. Home to mountain lions, marbled murrelets, towering old-growth Douglas-firs, and an immense diversity of other plants and animals, the Peninsula Watershed is a unique and wild expanse of open space just minutes from one of the most urbanized parts of California.

SFEI and our partners from the Exploratorium, the San Francisco Department of the Environment, and the Presidio Trust were joined live by over 400 participants for a conversation around the nature, both past and present, that is hidden in plain sight in San Francisco. On Wednesday, February 24th, SFEI unveiled our mapping of San Francisco’s historical ecology and shared stories that uncover the mysteries of San Francisco’s ecological past.

SFEI is coordinating the mapping for two inventories of surface waters, wetlands and other aquatic resources in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and along California’s coast. Both efforts will apply the California Aquatic Resource Inventory (CARI) standardized mapping methods and the final map will be integrated into EcoAtlas and made publicly available.