Golden+Gate+Park+Tour

I took a tour of Golden Gate State Park in San Francisco over spring break. During the tour we learned about the different microclimates of the park. We talked about and identified the rain forest area which is controlled using sprinklers to mimic the natural conditions of a rain forest. We also learned about how the entire park and some of the city were built on sand dunes, and if not up-kept by humans, the park would return to it’s natural sand state in 20-30 years. Our tour guide also discussed how someone illegally introduced a frog species to the park. The frog population grew exponentially and endangered many of the park’s native species, including many birds (the frogs were the size of bowling balls). The park had to drain the pond and set up many traps in order to get rid of the frog population, and is now seeing it’s ecosystem return to normal.

This tour overlaps with the curriculum and things we learn in this course. The overlaps include species introduction (a species living outside its native distributional range, which has arrived there by human activity), climates (the weather average over decades, centuries, and millennial), man made habitats (an environment manufactured or created by human beings, which contains the elements, sometimes synthetic, which would otherwise be found in a natural habitat, and are necessary to support a species), and endangered species (Has so few individual survivors that the species could soon become extinct over all or most of its natural range).