Ruth Askevold

The Flood Control 2.0 project team was presented with an Outstanding Environmental Project Award at the 13^th Biennial State of the Estuary Conference in Oakland, CA. The award is given by the Friends of the San Francisco Estuary to projects that benefit the San Francisco-Bay Delta Estuary and its watersheds.

SFEI and several agency partners recently completed a multi-year, EPA funded project called Flood Control 2.0. The goal of the project was to develop information that is useful for integrating habitat restoration into flood management at the Bay edge. Project outputs are now available at floodcontrol.sfei.org.

SFEI recently released a resilient landscape vision for lower Walnut Creek that incorporates habitat restoration actions into flood risk management. The vision, developed in coordination with a team of regional science experts, highlights opportunities for restoring and sustaining vital tidal wetland habitats around lower Walnut Creek while supporting a high level of flood protection under rising San Francisco Bay water levels.

Our partnership with Google to enhance the ecological resilience of urban landscapes is featured in a story by Fast Company, a Google Blog post, and an accompanying video.

Flood Control 2.0 is an ambitious regional effort aimed at helping restore stream and wetland habitats, water quality, and shoreline resilience around San Francisco Bay. The project leverages local resources from several forward-looking flood control agencies to redesign major flood control channels so that they provide both future flood conveyance and ecological benefit under a changing climate. This timely project will develop a set of innovative approaches for bringing environmental benefits and cost-savings to flood protection efforts at the mouths of creeks that drain to San Francisco Bay.

SFEI recently completed a landscape change analysis of lower San Francisquito Creek in the South Bay. The study was conducted as part of the larger Flood Control 2.0 project to increase regional flood protection will improving ecological diversity.  This particular project   illustrated the change in creek and bayland habitat conditions over the past 150 years.

The Exploratorium is displaying a map and essay developed by SFEI depicting the diversity, distribution, and people associated with the indigenous languages of the Bay Region. SFEI’s Chuck Striplen assembled existing information on the Bay’s languages and associated peoples; along with a description of the methods and background of linguistic reconstructions. This information appeared both on a large format map and in an accompanying essay.

SFEI and the San Francisco Estuary Partnership are proud to announce the release of the SF Bay Shore Inventory: Mapping for Sea Level Rise. This dataset provides a comprehensive and consistent picture of today’s Bay shore (up to MHHW + 10ft) for all nine Bay Area counties. The mapping captures features which affect flooding and flood routing (e.g., engineered levees, berms, embankments, roads, wetlands, etc.).

SFEI recently released a resilient landscape vision for lower Novato Creek that incorporates habitat restoration actions into flood risk management. The vision, developed in coordination with a team of regional science experts, highlights opportunities for restoring and sustaining vital tidal wetland habitats around lower Novato Creek while supporting a high level of flood protection under rising San Francisco Bay water levels.

SFEI recently completed an historical ecology study of lower Novato Creek in Marin County. The study was conducted as part of the larger Flood Control 2.0 project and was aimed at illustrating the change in creek and bayland habitat conditions over the past 120 years following the installation of flood control levees.