About the Santa Cruz Mountains

The Santa Cruz Mountains Bioregion covers an area of 3,592 square kilometers (1387 square miles) on the central coast, bounded on the north by the Golden Gate, on the East by San Francisco Bay and the Santa Clara Valley, on the south by the Pajaro River and on the west by the Pacific Ocean. It includes all of San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties and the western part of Santa Clara County. The region is essentially one of heavily populated lowlands surrounding a core of forested uplands, with small to large pockets of everything from salt marsh to chaparral intermixed. It is rich in endemics and many other natural features of special interest, some of whose past and current distributions are well known, others hardly at all.