About the Author

Phyllis M. Faber, a wetland biologist, has been a teacher, author and researcher for over thirty years. She has been involved in the design and monitoring of wetland restoration projects in San Francisco Bay with hydrologist Phil Williams since the mid-eighties, and together they have developed design guideline for restoration projects using their long experience and a twenty-year data set from monitoring three projects. In 1973 she was appointed to the North Central Regional California Coastal Commission and became chair following the enactment of the 1976 Coastal Act.

She established Pickleweed Press in 1980 to provide easy-to-use documents to identify the common wetland plants of California. She has authored and served as editor for several natural history and plant books. In 1984 Faber became the editor of Fremontia, the Journal of the California Native Plant Society, and grew the publication in size and distribution over the 16 years of her tenure. From 1990 to 1999 she published over seventeen books for the California Native Plant Society including seven floras for different areas in California and other relevant titles for botanists. She currently co-publishes books for the University of California Press and serves as General Editor of their California Natural History Series (both listed above).

Faber has been active in the non-profit world, most particularly in land protection issues that stem from her work on the Coastal Commission. In the late 1970s, she and Ellen Straus introduced the idea of an agricultural land trust to protect farm and ranchlands in Marin County. In 1980 the idea became an actuality, the first agricultural land trust in the nation, and with the help of very talented board members and staff, today 38% of Marin’s farmlands are protected from development through permanent conservation easements.