Coyote Valley

Introduction

The 7,400-acre Coyote Valley, located near San Jose, California, has a long agricultural history, and much of the land continues to be actively farmed. Once inhabited by native peoples, the site also serves as an essential wildlife corridor that provides a critical habitat for numerous species, some of which are endangered. Today, the San Jose area is known worldwide as Silicon Valley, the home of global leaders in the high-tech industry. Coyote Valley is the largest undeveloped landscape overlaying Silicon Valley’s groundwater aquifer and provides 2,500 acres of floodplain to mitigate flooding. Sprawl, a concern for decades, has recently become more acute and threatens this ecologically and culturally rich area.

“City of San Jose. Cal. 1875,” image courtesy of Library of Congress

History

Northern California’s Coyote Valley is located within Santa Clara County (one of the nine counties of the San Francisco Bay Area) at the southern edge of San Jose, the nation’s tenth-largest city, with a population of more than one million. Historically, the valley was the ancestral lands of native peoples, the Amah Mutsun and the Muwekma Ohlone.

San Jose was founded by Spanish settlers on November 29, 1777, as Pueblo de San José and was California's first civilian settlement. It was incorporated on March 27, 1850, one of the earliest incorporated cities in California, and was the site of the first state capitol. Before the turn of the twentieth century, Coyote Valley was characterized by five major habitat types and contained Laguna Seca, one of the largest wetlands in the Bay Area. In the twentieth century, when agriculture was dominant, the area was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

Today, the 7,400-acre area includes farms and ranches and contributes to the cultural identity, economic vitality, and aesthetic appeal of the region. Most significantly, Coyote Valley is a critical link between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and the Diablo Range to the east—collectively some 1.1 million acres of open space—providing an essential wildlife corridor for mountain lions, bobcats, American badgers, gray fox, coyotes, the western burrowing owl, and many other species, some of which are endangered. The San Jose area, to the north, is known as Silicon Valley and has become home to high-tech and other corporations, including Apple, eBay, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Tesla, and Yahoo. According to the conservation-focused Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority, created by the California state legislature in 1993: “The five historic major habitat types … have experienced 85 to 100% declines due to the conversion to the various agricultural and urbanized land uses, which has increased surface water runoff and reduced natural groundwater recharge. Freshwater wetlands declined 85-91%; primarily Laguna Seca, which underwent significant hydrologic alteration as the region was developed.”