San Francisco Bay is a shallow estuary surrounded by a large population center. The forces that built it began with plate tectonics and involved the collision of the Pacific and North American plates and the subduction of the Juan de Fuka plate. Changes in the climate resulting from the last ice age yielded lower and then higher sea levels. Human activity influenced the Bay. Gold mining during the California gold rush sent masses of slit into the Bay. Humans have also built several major cities and filled significant parts of the Bay. This book describes the natural history and evolution of the SF Bay Area over the last 50 million years through the present and into the future.

Key selling features:

• Summarizes a complex geological, geographical and ecological history
• Reviews how the San Francisco Bay has changed and will likely change in the future
• Examines the different roles and various drivers of Bay ecosystem function
• Includes the role of humans - both first peoples and modern populations - on the Bay
• Explores San Francisco Bay as an example of general bay ecolgical and environmental issues

About the Author

Gary C. Howard is science editor and writer. He spent over 20 years at the Gladstone Institutes of the University of California San Francisco. He received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and at Harvard University. He has edited several books, including three books for CRC Press.

Matthew R. Kaser is a Senior Partner at Bell & Associates in San Francisco and has been a part-time lecturer in the Department of Biological Sciences at California State University East Bay. He was on the faculty of the Department of Pediatrics, UCSF, an NIH Fellow at Habor-UCLA Medical Center and held postdoctoral researcher positions at the University of California Irvine, M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and at Oxford University.

Book Information
ISBN 9781138596726
Author Gary C. Howard
Format Hardback
Page Count 180
Imprint CRC Press
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 462g