By Robin Meadows

One of the beauties of the Bay Area is that the landscape is rich in remnants of the wilderness that was once there. Journey through the ancient salt marshes and freshwater seeps of the tidal flats, to the grand old oaks casting shade over deep pools along seasonal streams, and even the precipitous cliffs of Alcratraz island. Every one of these has vast ecological benefits and comprise some of the Bay’s small but key natural features.

Read More

Small Natural Features, Big Ecological Benefits

By Robin Meadows

One of the beauties of the Bay Area is that the landscape is rich in remnants of the wilderness that was once there. Journey through the ancient salt marshes and freshwater seeps of the tidal flats, to the grand old oaks casting shade over deep pools along seasonal streams, and even the precipitous cliffs of Alcratraz island. Every one of these has vast ecological benefits and comprise some of the Bay’s small but key natural features.

Read More

Related Content

About the author

Robin Meadows is an independent science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a water reporter at Maven's Notebook, a California water news site, and contributor to Chemical & Engineering News, Ka Pili Kai, KneeDeep Times, and Scientific American. Robin is also a Pulitzer Center grantee, an Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow, a contributor to The Craft of Science Writing, a mentor with The Open Notebook, and a UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program graduate. Find her on Tumblr and Twitter.

Related Posts

American Avocet on managed, former salt ponds in the South Bay. Photo: Roopak Bhatt, USGS

One-of-a-Kind Stories

Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
dam spillway oroville

Supplying Water

Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...

Tackling Pollution

Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems.  Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...