POST has purchased more than 6,000 acres of oak woodlands near Gilroy, saving it from becoming a sand and gravel mine. It’s ...

We’re surrounded by a world of insects that we barely notice. Put on your goggles and get immersed in the riot of colors and ...

Pastures are visible from a derelict milking barn at the historic D Ranch, founded in 1870 and abandoned after the creation of Point Reyes National Seashore. There’s an ambitious plan to restore these ...

Spiders — and their webs — hold a special place in our cultural mythology. Tattered webbing is a feature of any horror flick, an icon of the evil that is lurking about with the spiders themselves ...

The Pan American Highway runs through the Sechura Desert in Peru, one of the driest places on Earth -- except when El Niño arrives. (Photo by A. Duarte, Flickr Creative Commons) A low-hanging, densely ...

From creeping slime molds to brain-eating ciliates to kelp, protists may be the strangest and most misunderstood group of creatures in the tree of life. Haeckel pointed out the troublesome task of ...

A crow funeral can happen at any time. Farmers bear witness after shooting unwanted crows in their fields. Powerline workers see them should an unlucky bird zap itself and drop. Occasionally, the ...

State Route 12 cut to the horizon line of Solano County. Somewhere out of sight lay the small town of Rio Vista and the Delta. But about an hour northeast of San Francisco, midway through southern ...

Rocky outcroppings and serpentine barrens in the southern Diablo Range, near San Benito Mountain. Joaquín Murieta, both literary hero and historical figure, thrived in California’s rugged Inner Coast ...

A mom and pup in the wild. Southern sea otters were hunted out for their furs, and are making a comeback in central California with human help. (Photo by Erin Underwood) In a small kitchen inside the ...

Santa Cruz District Superintendent for California State Parks Chris Spohrer, and Amah Mutsun Tribal Band chairman Valentin Lopez stand in Quiroste Valley Cultural Preserve, surrounded by a field of ...

This summer, iNaturalist, the global social network for recording and collectively identifying the biodiversity around us, went independent. With the help of a $10 million startup grant, the ...