An historical review: Ingredients of the past create the stew of the present

A century of timber clear-cut and fragile mountain meadows overgrazed. A native fishery over harvested then destroyed. Lake Tahoe and its surrounding montane basin bear many scars from the days that preceded this era of appreciation for environmental health and integrity.  Now forty years after initial efforts to quantify the declining clarity of Lake Tahoe’s renowned crystal blue waters, research into the causes, extent, and potential remediation of environmental degradation in the lake basin has expanded from a focus on limnology and water chemistry to include investigations in atmospheric science, watershed dynamics, forest health, and biodiversity.  Problem-driven, multidisciplinary research efforts have gone far toward identifying the multifarious sources of the nutrients and fine sediments that compromise the lake’s unique transparency; nonetheless, efforts to institutionalize the scientific endeavors that are critical to shaping the policy agenda and management efforts to restore historic conditions in the lake have had limited success.  Despite ample political support and substantial funding commitments, restoration efforts have only barely been integrated across agencies, are often ad hoc in implementation, and have just nominally been assessed for their efficacy.  Adaptive management remains an elusive concept for all the classic reasons – entrenched agency prerogatives, firewalls that hinder communication between management institutions, and a lack of understanding of science-based monitoring and its value in environmental management. A newly established Tahoe Science Consortium is serving to facilitate communication across the long-standing gap between scientists and managers, while delivering an omnibus, integrated research plan in support of basin-wide environmental restoration efforts, competitive, peer-reviewed funding of research efforts in diverse scientific issue areas, and an emerging volume that describes the available scientific knowledge, its management implications, and key uncertainties that still compromise a most efficient environmental restoration program.