San Francisco Nature Education
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San Francisco Nature Education
San Francisco Nature Education is a non-profit environmental education organization in San Francisco, California that provides interactive environmental education programs for the development of leadership and stewardship in youth and adults. It was founded by Nancy DeStefanis, who serves as its executive director. San Francisco Nature Education provides educational programs that focus primarily on students from underserved communities. The programs expose students to nature and educate them about local and migratory birds, recycling, and conservation. Local parks, such as Golden Gate Park and Crissy Field, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, are used as natural classrooms to observe local and migratory birds and to provide inspiring and engaging natural experiences. San Francisco Nature Education supports and augments the State of California's Content Standards by teaching Kindergarten through 5th grade students through science, language arts, creative arts, and ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ...
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Nancy DeStefanis
Nancy H. DeStefanis is an American environmental educator, field ornithologist and lecturer. She is credited for discovering and documenting the first colony of great blue herons to nest in San Francisco in 1993, and for monitoring them for the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory every year since then—an activity that earned her the nickname of "Heron Lady of Golden Gate Park". She features in ''Heron Island'' (1998), a short documentary directed by Judy Irving about the heronry of Stow Lake in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. In 2005 she received the Jefferson Award for Public Service. DeStefanis is the founder and executive director of San Francisco Nature Education, a nonprofit introducing children in underserved schools to urban nature conservation and science. Prior to working as an environmental educator, DeStefanis was an attorney who served as a community organizer for the United Farm Workers Union The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United F ...
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Bird Migration
Bird migration is the regular seasonal movement, often north and south along a flyway, between breeding and wintering grounds. Many species of bird migrate. Migration carries high costs in predation and mortality, including from hunting by humans, and is driven primarily by the availability of food. It occurs mainly in the northern hemisphere, where birds are funneled onto specific routes by natural barriers such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Caribbean Sea. Migration of species such as storks, turtle doves, and swallows was recorded as many as 3,000 years ago by Ancient Greek authors, including Homer and Aristotle, and in the Book of Job. More recently, Johannes Leche began recording dates of arrivals of spring migrants in Finland in 1749, and modern scientific studies have used techniques including bird ringing and satellite tracking to trace migrants. Threats to migratory birds have grown with habitat destruction, especially of stopover and wintering sites, as wel ...
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Recycling
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. The recovery of energy from waste materials is often included in this concept. The recyclability of a material depends on its ability to reacquire the properties it had in its original state. It is an alternative to "conventional" waste disposal that can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. It can also prevent the waste of potentially useful materials and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reducing energy use, air pollution (from incineration) and water pollution (from landfilling). Recycling is a key component of modern waste reduction and is the third component of the "Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle" waste hierarchy. It promotes environmental sustainability by removing raw material input and redirecting waste output in the economic system. There are some ISO standards related to recycling, such as ISO 15270:2008 for plastics waste and ISO 14001:2015 for enviro ...
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Conservation Movement
The conservation movement, also known as nature conservation, is a political, environmental, and social movement that seeks to manage and protect natural resources, including animal, fungus, and plant species as well as their habitat for the future. Conservationists are concerned with leaving the environment in a better state than the condition they found it in. Evidence-based conservation seeks to use high quality scientific evidence to make conservation efforts more effective. The early conservation movement evolved out of necessity to maintain natural resources such as fisheries, wildlife management, water, soil, as well as conservation and sustainable forestry. The contemporary conservation movement has broadened from the early movement's emphasis on use of sustainable yield of natural resources and preservation of wilderness areas to include preservation of biodiversity. Some say the conservation movement is part of the broader and more far-reaching environmental movem ...
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Golden Gate Park
Golden Gate Park, located in San Francisco, California, United States, is a large urban park consisting of of public grounds. It is administered by the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department, which began in 1871 to oversee the development of Golden Gate Park. Configured as a rectangle, it is similar in shape to but 20 percent larger than Central Park in New York City, to which it is often compared. It is over three miles () long east to west, and about half a mile () north to south. With 24 million visitors annually, Golden Gate is the third most-visited city park in the United States after Central Park and the Lincoln Memorial. History Development In the 1860s, San Franciscans began to feel the need for a spacious public park similar to Central Park, which was then taking shape in New York City. Golden Gate Park was carved out of unpromising sand and shore dunes that were known as the Outside Lands, in an unincorporated area west of San Francisco's then-current borders ...
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Crissy Field
Crissy Field is a public recreation area on the northern shore of the San Francisco Peninsula in California, United States, located just east of the Golden Gate Bridge. It includes restored tidal marsh and beaches. Crissy Field is a former United States Army airfield which is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Historically part of the Presidio of San Francisco, Crissy Field closed as an airfield after 1974. Under Army control, the site was affected by dumping of hazardous materials. The National Park Service took control of the area in 1994 and, together with the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy, worked to restore the site until 2001, when the Crissy Field Center was opened to the public. While most buildings have been preserved as they were in the 1920s, some have been transformed into offices, retail space, and residences. History The land Crissy Field resides on is an ancient salt marsh and estuary. Prior to European settlement, the Ohlone ...
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Golden Gate National Recreation Area
The Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) is a U.S. National Recreation Area protecting of ecologically and historically significant landscapes surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of the park is land formerly used by the United States Army. GGNRA is managed by the National Park Service and is the most visited unit of the National Park system in the United States, with more than 15 million visitors a year. It is also one of the largest urban parks in the world, with a size two-and-a-half times that of the consolidated city and county of San Francisco. The park is not one continuous locale, but rather a collection of areas that stretch from southern San Mateo County to northern Marin County, and includes several areas of San Francisco. The park is as diverse as it is expansive; it contains famous tourist attractions such as Muir Woods National Monument, Alcatraz, and the Presidio of San Francisco. The GGNRA is also home to over 3,000 plant and animal species, e ...
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San Francisco Botanical Garden
The San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum (formerly Strybing Arboretum) is located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Its 55 acres (22.3 ha) represents nearly 9,000 different kinds of plants from around the world, with particular focus on Magnolia species, high elevation palms, conifers, and cloud forest species from Central America, South America and Southeast Asia. San Francisco's County Fair Building is located near the main entrance to the Garden. History Plans for the garden were originally laid out in the 1880s by park supervisor John McLaren, but funding was insufficient to begin construction until Helene Strybing left a major bequest in 1927. Planting was begun in 1937 with WPA funds supplemented by local donations, and the Arboretum officially opened in May 1940. As a part of Golden Gate Park, it is officially managed by the city of San Francisco, but the San Francisco Botanical Garden Society plays an important role in providing educational ...
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California Quail
The California quail (''Callipepla californica''), also known as the California valley quail or Valley quail, is a small ground-dwelling bird in the New World quail family. These birds have a curving crest or '' plume'', made of six feathers, that droops forward: black in males and brown in females; the flanks are brown with white streaks. Males have a dark brown cap and a black face with a brown back, a grey-blue chest and a light brown belly. Females and immature birds are mainly grey-brown with a light-colored belly. Their closest relative is Gambel's quail, which has a more southerly distribution and a longer crest at , a brighter head and lacks the scaly appearance of the California quail. The two species separated about 1–2 million years ago, during the Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene. It was selected as the state bird of California in 1931. Taxonomy Subspecies There are seven recognized subspecies: * ''C. c. achrustera'' (Peters, 1923) – San Lucas California quail ...
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Great Blue Heron
The great blue heron (''Ardea herodias'') is a large wading bird in the heron family Ardeidae, common near the shores of open water and in wetlands over most of North America and Central America, as well as the Caribbean and the Galápagos Islands. It is a rare vagrant to coastal Spain, the Azores, and areas of far southern Europe. An all-white population found in south Florida and the Florida Keys is known as the great white heron. Debate exists about whether this represents a white color morph of the great blue heron, a subspecies of it, or an entirely separate species. The status of white individuals known to occur elsewhere in the Caribbean, and their existence is rarely found elsewhere besides in eastern North America. Taxonomy The great blue heron was one of the many species originally described by Carl Linnaeus in his 18th-century work, '' Systema Naturae''. The scientific name comes from Latin ''ardea'', and Ancient Greek (), both meaning "heron". The great blue ...
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Lowell High School (San Francisco)
Lowell High School is a co-educational, public high school in San Francisco, California. History 1853-1893 In 1853, Colonel Thomas J. Nevins, San Francisco's first superintendent of schools, broached the idea of a free high school for boys and a seminary for girls. It took three years for Nevins to persuade the Board of Education that a high school was necessary, and a resolution was passed on July 10, 1856, to establish a San Francisco High School and Ladies' Seminary. Six days later, however, the resolution was rescinded on the grounds that a high school could not legally be part of the San Francisco Common Schools; opponents in the city saw no need for an education beyond the eighth grade funded by the public. A simple name change from the proposed ''San Francisco High School and Ladies' Seminary'' to the ''Union Grammar School'' appeased those who had opposed the creation of a high school. The Union Grammar School first opened on August 25, 1856, in rented quarters at th ...
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