San Francisco ranked sixth nationally this year on an annual park rating index, one spot ahead of last year’s seventh-place finish. Fremont ranked 38th, San Jose placed 41st, and Oakland climbed eight spots in the rankings to 44th.

The ParkScore index is a report from the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit that works to create and protect parks, trails, and other public lands. The organization evaluates the park systems in the 100 most populous U.S. cities, using five criteria: park access, equity, acreage, investment, and amenities.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.