This book tells the story of how a few forward-thinking UC faculty, who'd had their research plots and teaching spots destroyed by development and habitat degradation, devised a way to save representative examples of many of California's major ecosystems.

Thoughtful, provocative, and playful, Boom: A Journal of California aims to create a lively conversation about the vital social, cultural, and political issues of our times, in California and the world beyond.

This long-anticipated reference and sourcebook for CaliforniaÕs remarkable ecological abundance provides an integrated assessment of each major ecosystem typeÑits distribution, structure, function, and management. A comprehensive synthesis of our knowledge about this biologically diverse state, Ecosystems of California covers the state from oceans to mountaintops using multiple lenses: past and present, flora and fauna, aquatic and terrestrial, natural and managed. Each chapter evaluates natural processes for a specific ecosystem, describes drivers of change, and discusses how that ecosystem may be altered in the future. This book also explores the drivers of CaliforniaÕs ecological patterns and the history of the stateÕs various ecosystems, outlining how the challenges of climate change and invasive species and opportunities for regulation and stewardship could potentially affect the stateÕs ecosystems. The text explicitly incorporates both human impacts and conservation and restoration efforts and shows how ecosystems support human well-being. Edited by two esteemed ecosystem ecologists and with overviews by leading experts on each ecosystem, this definitive work will be indispensable for natural resource management and conservation professionals as well as for undergraduate or graduate students of CaliforniaÕs environment and curious naturalists.

This exploration into the San Francisco Bay covers an array of topics including fish and wildlife populations, ocean and climate cycles, endangered and invasive species, and the path from industrialization to environmental restoration.