San Francisco is a heavily urbanized city which still maintains a suprisingly rich variety of plant and animal communities. Coastal scrub, grassland, oak woodlands, marsh, and stream-sides hold species found nowhere outside of California. Landscaped areas of non-native plant communities play a role in supporting San Francisco's biodiversity by providing food and shelter for migratory and resident birds. It is important that residents of the City continue to respect and protect the current level of biodiversity for this and future generations.

Harvard professor and Pulitzer-prize winner Edward O. Wilson has expressed four primary reasons why protecting and maintaining biodiversity is important: biodiversity maintains the integrity of life known on earth; through medicine, agriculture and economics, biodiversity provides a range of genetic, biochemical, and physical properties of plant and animal life that are advantageous to human welfare; biodiversity is worthy of preservation because it represents human kinship in common with other living organisms; and biodiversity is a source of national heritage, giving historic importance to place.

Past and present threats to biodiversity include: the introduction of non-native plants that displace indigenous plants; features of urban development that have resulted in loss and fragmentation of habitat; mismanagement of domesticated animals; and, more generally, the negative effects of industrial pollution on air, water, and soil.

A sustainable future -- one that provides for the needs of the present without sacrificing the ability of future generations and the natural world to provide for their own needs - is something that we can all work for. You can find out more information on biodiversity at the Biodiversity Resource Center, an environmental library located on the exhibit floor of the California Academy of Sciences. The Center provides direct access to the variety of informational resources which describe biodiversity, the threats to it, and human efforts to preserve it. The Center is designed to serve a full range of users, from students with little scientific knowledge to advanced researchers.