Laurel Village Manzanita and Native Plant Hunt

Join the California Academy of Sciences and the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, as we document all the plants and animals we can throughout Laurel Village. The serpentine soils of this part of San Francisco were once home to oak woodlands, manzanitas, and other unique plants and animals. In fact, until the 1940s,cemeteries on Laurel Hill were the last place the Franciscan Manzanita was found. Scientists, including Alice Eastwood, from the California Academy of Sciences, fought to save this beautiful open space and the manzanita, to no avail.This plant was thought to be extinct in the wild until it was spotted from his car window by, California Native Plant Society Executive Director, Dan Gluesenkamp during the construction project along Doyle Drive (the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge) in 2009! By searching some of the last open spaces in the Laurel Hill area, can we find more of these plants?

Bring your curiosity and tons of enthusiasm. We’ll rally some experts and folks who know city nature well. Together we’ll make some great discoveries, get to know the biodiversity in the Laurel Hill Area and each other better! We may even find native manzanitas and other patches on remnant habitat. Bring your smartphone and/or digital camera, if you have one, but your observation skills and desire to discover are the most important things to bring!

A Bio-Blitz is an intensive one-day study of biodiversity in a specific location, bringing professional scientists and amateurs citizen-scientists together. Together, we’ll look for snails, salamanders, birds, butterflies, other insects, spiders, trees, worms, flowers, and everything else we can find!

People of all ages and skill levels are welcome! Bring your smart phone for sure. Bonus: camera, binoculars, and magnifying glasses. We’ll enter our observations in iNaturalist and join together at the end to find out how many observations we made and how many species we found. Past blitzes in Oakland, San Francisco, and San Mateo have averaged 1000 observations and 200+ species each. Hooray!

Don't have an iNat account yet? No problem! Sign up for an iNaturalist account, then download the app for your iPhone or Android.

Join us for the Laurel Village Manzanita Hunt & Bioblitz at:

Meet at the Jewish Community Center of San Franciso 3200 California Street San Francisco, CA 94118

We will meet at 9:00, divide into teams, choose our routes, and get blitzing!

We'll meet back at the JCC for lunch and to go over our finds!