Surveying the Pillar Point Reef

Pillar Point reef, south of San Francisco on the San Mateo coast and home to the famous Maverick’s Surf Contest, is a diverse, rocky, intertidal site adjacent to the Montara State Marine Reserve. When the reserve was established as a California State Marine Protected Area in 2007, the Pillar Point reef was excluded from the reserve boundaries as a control site for comparison purposes. There have been few on-going intertidal monitoring programs in place on the reef, however, until now.

In partnership with the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, the California Academy of Sciences is documenting the biodiversity of Pillar Point reef through large-scale bioblitzes, long-term citizen science monitoring, and casual observation. By 2014, our citizen scientists had documented more than 350 species, building a baseline species list for Pillar Point.