California is suddenly rocked from top to bottom by two catastrophic earthquakes that bring the state to its knees. These are the gripping stories of a handful of struggling survivors and their life and death experiences. You’ll be spellbound on the edge of your seat every step of the way. Situations include people trapped in a dangling Palm Springs tram car, a collapsed Disneyland roller coaster ride, and deadly wild fires raging out of control and burning everything in their path. Streets are buckled and impassable, and vital utilities all shut down indefinitely. Untold numbers of people are trapped in the rubble of toppled buildings. Families are separated and later reunited. Fortunes are made while others such as generations of real estate holdings are wiped out. The cast of colorful characters includes an eccentric attorney and his terrified trophy wife, a doctor sadly widowed by the earthquake, a pair of young newlyweds who suffer a tragic death, a family on vacation thrust into the struggle of their lives, a devious bank teller turned bank thief, a high school hockey team turned heroes and saviors, and many more.

This long-anticipated reference and sourcebook for California’s remarkable ecological abundance provides an integrated assessment of each major ecosystem type—its 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 California’s ecological patterns and the history of the state’s various ecosystems, outlining how the challenges of climate change and invasive species and opportunities for regulation and stewardship could potentially affect the state’s 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 California’s environment and curious naturalists.