DRI Joins New Research Alliance Focusing on Lake Tahoe

Scratch the surface of your average Lake Tahoe Basin resident, say the area's environmental managers, and you'll find an unusual level of sophistication about the basin's planning and environmental issues. These people know their acronyms, buzz words, technical terms, and bureaucratic trivia, and they're always ready to talk about them.

Someone finally listened... The first long-term effort to monitor and characterize the health and clearity of the lake's deep blue waters was launched in the 1960's by Dr. Charles Goldman, a University of California, Davis (UCD) limnologist, who would eventually found UCD's Tahoe Research Group (TRG). Goldman's annual reports of the steady reduction of the lake's clearity have served as an alarm for both the scientific community and political leadership to come to the aid of the lake. Somebody finally heard him, and today dozens of scientist from nevada and Californai institutions, as well as the lakes federal managers are in the early stages of a major researhc initiative for the basin. Here, Goldman uses a magnifying viewer onthe deck of TRG's research boat to examine Lake Tahoe zooplankton. (Photo courtesy of UCD News Service)

This awareness underlies a deeply felt commitment to preserving the region's world-famous beauty, and the people who live there know full well both the difficulty of the challenges, and the consequences of unthinkable failure. Forecasts now offer only a ten-year window to reverse the trend of Tahoe's environmental degradation, or risk an irreversible loss of the lake's legendary clarity.

In spite of this grim picture, there is a new sense of optimism for Tahoe's future among the land use planners and managers in the basin. It may have begun with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency's (TRPA) adoption of the Environmental Improvement Program in 1997. It continued that year with the Presidential Summit initiated by U.S. Senator Harry Reid, substantially raising the political and financial commitment of the federal government, manager of more than 70 percent of the basin's lands. A year ago, Congress made a $30 million annual commitment to Tahoe when it passed the Lake Tahoe Restoration Act.

It continues today with an aggressive new research alliance that has pushed scientists from the Desert Research Institute to the front lines of the battle for the lake's survival. Environmental scientists, land use planners, natural resource managers, and political leaders, from local governments to the national level, are now linked to focus available research resources to find the best solutions for Tahoe's challenges.

Dr. John Tracy, executive director of DRI's Center for Watersheds and Environmental Sustainability, is coordinating the Tahoe efforts of a dozen of his DRI colleagues and leads DRI's interaction with fellow scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and the University of California, Davis (UCD). DRI took the lead in developing a framework agreement known as the Tahoe Environmental Science System (TESS), adopted in 1999 for scientific cooperation in the basin.

Tracy is also co-chair of the TRPA Science Advisory Group (SAG), also established in 1999, which incorporates representatives from DRI, UNR, UCD, TRPA, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Forest Service. Chaired by TRPA Senior Planner Kevin Hill, the SAG coordinates the growing volume of research in the basin to ensure that it is focused on the most critical needs identified by local planners to help them answer key policy questions in a timely manner.

"For years, prior to the formation of SAG, science and research in the basin were not necessarily connected with the tasks that the agencies wanted to accomplish," says Hill. "On the other hand, the management questions were not well articulated for the science community. The fact that this group has already developed a research plan that relates back to key management questions for Lake Tahoe is significant."

One of President Bill Clinton's first directives stemming from the 1997 summit was completion of a thorough assessment of existing scientific knowledge pertinent to the future of the Lake Tahoe watershed. That work, an intense collaboration of the three research institutions, TRPA, and the Forest Service, was completed in February 2000, and became the starting point for the formation of a new approach to land use planning in the basin known as "adaptive management." (see "Why Adaptive Management will work for Lake Tahoe" by John Tracy)

An important early success in the new Tahoe research effort. Dr. Glenn Miller, a professor in Environmental and Resource Sciences at the University of Nevada, Reno, is shown taking water samples along the shoreline of Homewood Bay on Tahoe's west shore. Miller directed one of the first major successes in the new Tahoe research effort that clearly identified unburned fuel from two-stroke boat motors as a major source of water pollution in the lake. The TRPA subsequently banned the engines from the basin. (Photo courtesy of UNR Office of Communications)

On August 21, Nevada's two U.S. senators, Reid and John Ensign, joined with Nevada Congressman James Gibbons and Governor Kenny Guinn to host U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Director Christie Todd Whitman at a fourth anniversary of Clinton's summit on the shore of the lake. (See images taken from this event.) Nevada's congressional delegation is already working hard to find more money for Tahoe research, and Whitman promised EPA's commitment to the effort as well.

Whitman urged the federal agencies managing basin lands to include future proposals for Tahoe research in their agencies' basic operating budgets, thereby giving the work a much higher probability for success. Tracy points out that the agencies have already made a start in that direction by specifying funds for SAG, and that recent congressional budget successes have already caused a dramatic increase in scientific activity at Tahoe by DRI scientists and their colleagues from UNR and UCD.

"This is a rare instance where environmental scientists studying a problem have a direct 'cause and effect' relationship with the decision-making process trying to resolve it," says Tracy. "All of the scientists from DRI, UNR, and UCD are acutely aware of how golden an opportunity we have to make a profoundly beneficial impact on Lake Tahoe's future."

-John Doherty