This volume presents 135 of the papers presented at the 1981 California Riparian Systems Conference. The papers address all aspects of riparian systems: habitat, wildlife, land management, land use policy planning, conservation and water resource management.

"Leading experts in geography, biology, botany, zoology, and geoscience present new research on the desert grassland and review a vast amount of earlier work. They reveal that present-day grasses once grew in the ice age forests that existed in these areas before the climate dried and the trees vanished, and how the intensity and frequency of fire can influence the plant and animal species of the grassland.

The Emeryville Shellmound, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, was excavated and subsequently destroyed in the early twentieth century. From its stratified deposits, which span the period 2600 to 700 years ago, the author identified 2,004 fish and 15,893 mammal specimens, and analyzed these and 2,302 avian remains previously identified by Hildegarde Howard in the 1920s. A battery of independent tests derived from foraging theory supports the conclusion that human-induced impacts on vertebrate populations caused declines in the efficiency of foraging across the time that the Emeryville locality was occupied.