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Northern California usually refers to the state's northernmost 48 counties. The main population centers of Northern California include San Francisco Bay Area (which includes the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and the largest city of the region, San Jose), and Sacramento (the state capital) as well as its metropolitan area.
Other than the Pacific Coast, the Transverse Ranges and the Peninsular Ranges are the two most important physical landscapes in the region. Both ranges have their particular characteristics, from the trend of the mountains, to the different climates within each range. The ellipse outlines the region of the California Transverse Ranges.
Defined by the Pacific Coast on the west, the Sierra Nevada (mountains) and the deserts of California on the east, and the Northern California Coast Ranges on the north, the Mediterranean California ecoregion has unique physical characteristics that play a large role in the natural systems of the region, including hydrology.
The Central Valley is a broad, elongated, flat valley that dominates the interior of California, United States.It is 40–60 mi (60–100 km) wide and runs approximately 450 mi (720 km) from north-northwest to south-southeast, inland from and parallel to the Pacific coast of the state.
The oldest rocks in California date back 1.8 billion years to the Proterozoic and are found in the San Gabriel Mountains, San Bernardino Mountains, and Mojave Desert.The rocks of eastern California formed a shallow continental shelf, with massive deposition of limestone during the Paleozoic, and sediments from this time are common in the Sierra Nevada, Klamath Mountains and eastern Transverse ...
There are three main deserts in California: the Mojave Desert, the Colorado Desert, and the Great Basin Desert. [5]: 408 The Mojave Desert is bounded by the Tehachapi Mountains on the northwest, the San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains on the south, and extends eastward to California's borders with Arizona and Nevada; it also forms portions of northwest Arizona.
The California Trail became the first important land link between San Francisco Bay and the eastern United States during the gold rush and became the route of the First transcontinental railroad in 1869. The gold rush brought approximately 200,000 new residents to California, and 36% of Californians lived around San Francisco Bay by 1870. [2]
The California chaparral and woodlands ecoregion has a great range of plant communities in the Southern Coast Ranges, including mixed evergreen forests, oak woodland and savannas, grasslands, northern coastal scrub, and the Monterey Pine woodlands of the Monterey Peninsula and two other coastal enclaves of the Santa Lucia Range.