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Biogeographical Building Blocks of Santa Cruz County

  1. The three main lowland streams and their fertile valleys: Pajaro River, San Lorenzo River, Soquel Creek.
  1. The Pajaro Valley Slough system (Watsonville, Harkins, Gallighan, Hanson, East and West Struve)
  1. The Pajaro Valley chain of lakes (College, Pinto, Kelly, Drew, Tynan)
  1. Soda Lake and its alkaline valley.
  1. The mid-county chain of tidal “lagoons” (Woods, Schwan, Corcoran)
  1. The North Coast creeks and their little lagoons and pocket beaches (especially Waddell, Scott, Laguna, Wilder, Liddell, San Vicente, Yellow Bank), all part of . . .
  1. The Santa Cruz mudstone “wall” along the whole North Coast, with rocky ocean cliffs and steep “hanging garden” slopes and prairie terraces behind them, and behind that . . .
  1. The big granite-and-limestone block of Ben Lomond Mountain covered in mixed-evergreen forest (and a lot else, including:)
  1. The bizarre Lockheed “chalks” with their shopping list of manzanitas.
  1. The Bonny Doon sand outcrops.
  1. The funnel-shaped central-county cornucopia and center of endemism a.k.a. Scotts Valley National Park, all nestled in the lower half of the San Lorenzo Valley, and containing:
  1. The Zayante/Ben Lomond sandhills complex on the left, with all their endemic plants and bugs, and . . .
  1. The Scotts Valley grasslands on the right, with endemics of their own, sitting on a broken-off chunk of North Coast mudstone, and the smaller, isolated flowery grasslands of Pasatiempo and Graham Hill Showgrounds, and . . .
  1. The erstwhile artesian marsh system of Camp Evers, with lots of rare, disjunct plants.
  1. The big mid-county Purisima block, mostly covered in redwoods in right half (i.e. Nisene Marks State Park) but the left half nicely incised and diversified with grassy terrace and ridge-tops, down to the coastal plain and including the especially nice, especially open series of second terraces like “Santa Cruz Gardens,” O’Neill Ranch, and Monterey Bay Heights.
  1. The big, wide mid-county coastal plain, maybe all open coastal prairie originally with wide-open spaces, now solid slurbia. Narrower arms extend well up the North Coast, and South to La Selva Beach.
  1. The sandy Monterey Bay shore, one long sand beach backed by one long sand cliff.
  1. The big dune system from La Selva to the Pajaro River, best developed at Sunset Beach State Park, with low foredunes and high back dunes and in the “ault-smear” zone along the county’s entire backbone.
  1. The Aromas red sands area, with mosaic of maritime chaparral and more recent coast live oak woodland, petering out eastward to Corralitos etc.
  1. The Sierra Azul ridge, with our most diverse chaparral but no endemic or rare species. Entire ridge is almost all chaparral and knobcone pine, unlike . . .
  1. The Castle Rock ridge, with mostly mixed evergreen forest and some chaparral and our only black oak woodland.
  1. Big Basin and Little Basin and Pine Mountain—mostly solid redwood. Should be combined with upper San Lorenzo Valley including rich pocket meadows and chaparral patches all the way up to Eagle Rock, but mostly just redwood.