Franco Biondi
Associate Professor of Physical Geography
Geography,
College of Science
Research
Dr. Biondi and his students study past climatic and environmental change. Since 2000, he has developed tree-ring chronologies from and near the Lake Tahoe Basin that cover several centuries (up to 2300 years) at annual to seasonal resolution. More details on his research can be found at the DendroLab web site, http://woods.geography.unr.edu/.
fbiondi@unr.edu
Updated: 1/10/2005
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Geoffrey Blewitt
Research Professor of Space Geodesy
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology,
Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering
Research
Situated on the western boundary of the Basin and Range province against the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, Lake Tahoe has been undergoing continuous tranformation over the last few million years by tectonic activity associated with the boundary between the North American and Pacific plates. A permanent GPS station on top of Slide Mountain (the Mount Rose ski resort) was installed by Caltech in 1997 and has since been continuously monitoring permanent tectonic deformation of the area with 1-mm precision. Our analysis of these data discovered that Slide Mountain moved upward and northeastward from July 2003 to January 2004 by 1 cm more than expected from tectonics alone. Our 2004 paper in Science [Smith et al., 2004]* concludes that this movement, associated with an unusually deep swarm of micro-earthquakes beneath Lake Tahoe, was caused by the movement of magma in the lower part of the Earth's crust. This magmatic intrusion is considered too deep (30 km) to be of immediate public concern; however the study does show that Lake Tahoe is magmatically active, which was surprising since we have no evidence for surface volcanism in this region over the last million years or so. It also illustrates the importance of using GPS to monitor potential geo-hazards in the Lake Tahoe region.
*Smith, K.D., D. von Seggern, G. Blewitt, L. Preston, J.G. Anderson, B.P. Wernicke, J.L. Davis, Evidence for deep magma injection beneath Lake Tahoe, Nevada-California, Science, doi:10.1126/science.1101304, 2004.
- link to pdf file:
http://www.nbmg.unr.edu/staff/pdfs/science1277.pdf
- link to "moving mountain" video interview:
http://imedia.unr.edu/Tahoe/Tahoeseismo.asx
gblewitt@unr.edu
Updated: 1/10/2005
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Wendy M. Calvin
Research Associate Professor
Geological Sciences,
College of Science
Research
Dr. Calvin specializes in optical and infrared remote sensing data interpretation. She is currently involved in two pilot studies to examine using satellite data to monitor lake clarity, snow cover area and snow water equivalent on seasonal and annual time scales.
wcalvin@unr.edu
Updated: 2/4/2005
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Sudeep Chandra
Assistant Professor of Aquatic Ecology
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Dr. Sudeep Chandra has been studying the Lake Tahoe-Truckee watershed for the last 4 years. His research focuses on understanding the impacts of nonnative introductions and cultural eutrophication on the Lake Tahoe ecosystem. Specifically, he investigates the energetic changes to lake fisheries as well as the biogeochemical cycling of mercury as nutrient and contaminant loading has increased over time. He is coleading a research program studying the restoration of the Lahontan cutthroat trout, a threatened species, in Fallen Leaf Lake. Dr. Chandra also volunteers as the science advisor for an in basin education program called the Tahoe-Baikal Institute.
sudeep@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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Michael W Collopy
Interim Director
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
Academy for the Environment
Research
As interim director of the Academy for the Environment, I have responsibility for promoting the teaching, research and outreach environmental programs at the University of Nevada. In this capacity, I am representing the university on an interagency group working to develop a research and science consortium for Lake Tahoe that will help identify and facilitate priority research in support of natural resource managers in the Tahoe Basin.
mcollopy@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 1/11/2005
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Susan Donaldson
Area Specialist
Western Extension Area - Reno,
Cooperative Extension
Research
Various weed species have been invading the Lake Tahoe Basin with increasing frequency as a result of transportation patterns and the use of contaminated materials. Prior attempts to control weeds in the basin included efforts by individual counties and agencies, but the lack of coordination resulted in efforts that were fragmented and inefficient. A bi-state, coordinated approach was needed. In 2002, a group of concerned agency staff, educators, and residents banded together to form the Lake Tahoe Basin Weed Coordinating Group to respond to this increasing threat from invasive weeds. The goal of the program is to raise public awareness of invasive weeds in the Tahoe Basin and to locate, map, and eradicate target species. We work with federal, state, county, and city agencies, as well as local homeowner associations, residents, and environmental groups. To date, we have received funding for basin-wide inventory, monitoring, and control as well as a coordinated public education campaign.
donaldsons@unce.unr.edu
Updated: 12/12/2004
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Peter Goin
Professor of Art
Art,
College of Liberal Arts
Research
Using photographs from a variety of national and local archives, Stopping Time: A Rephotographic Survey of Lake Tahoe offers comparative views of historical and contemporary photographs, providing a visual document of the evolving landscape within the Tahoe Basin. The central essay, written by Elizabeth Raymond, incorporates and defines the interpretation of "landscape as architecture." The landscape at Lake Tahoe has been created and substantially managed since the logging industry marketed the basin's wealth. Urban areas, rivers and streams, and the topography have been constructed in an attempt to preserve the "ideal landscape."
pgoin@unr.edu
Updated: 1/21/2005
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Howard Goldbaum
Associate Professor of Journalism
Reynolds School of Journalism
Research
My creative projects focus upon local environmental and historical subjects, some of which feature multimedia components depicting aspects of Lake Tahoe.
goldbaum@unr.edu
Updated: 3/1/2005
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William C Hammond
Assistant Research Professor
Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology,
Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering
Research
In my research I measure active deformation of the Earth's crust using geodetic techniques such as the Global Positioning System (GPS). By inferring the style and distribution of this deformation we can learn more about the organization of seismogenic faulting, and infer the source of stresses in the lithosphere. With GPS we can better understand the processes that control the gradual deformation of the western U.S. continental interior, and hence better understand the physics behind Earth deformation and earthquakes.
whammond@unr.edu
Updated: 12/12/2005
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Dale Johnson
Professor of Forest Soil Chemistry
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Dr. Dale Johnson and his students have been conducting biogeochemical cycling research in and near the Tahoe Basin for the last 15 years. His research has included baseline studies of nutrient fluxes, effects of nitrogen-fixing species, harvesting fire on soil nutrients and water quality, including stimulation modeling studies. He and his students have presented many papers at national and international meetings and published numerous articles on these studies and which are available on request.
dwj@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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John A Kleppe
Professor and Chair
Electrical Engineering,
College of Engineering
Research
Professor Kleppe has discovered large trees rooted at a depth of 36.5 m (120') below the existing surface level of Fallen Leaf Lake. Fallen Leaf is one of the major watershed areas for Lake Tahoe. Some of these trees measure over 30 m (98') tall with a circumference of over 4.5 m (15'), which is an indication that they were over two hundred years in age when they died. The significance of this discovery is the fact that for these trees to be rooted below the surface of the lake, the lake must have been down at least 36.5 m for over two hundred years. This would indicate that a "mega drought" had occurred, since several of these trees have been carbon dated to have "drowned" in 1215 A.D. +/- 40 years. This would indicate that the drought persisted during the medieval period 850-1150 A.D., and was followed by an extremely wet period that brought the lake level back up high enough to drown the trees. There are also signs on these trees that another severe drought occurred sometime later, but did not persist for as long as the first one.
Professor Kleppe has obtained grant support to study these submerged rooted trees. He has been operating a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) that can obtain high resolution color video and retrieve small wood samples down to a depth of about 152 m (500') below the lake surface. The trees are invisible to sonar since they have become completely water logged from being underwater for approximately 800 years. Visual searching has been required to locate them.
These trees may be the only known full size trees that grew during the Medieval drought period in the Sierras. The tree ring data from these trees are providing a valuable climate history of the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Professor Kleppe has also proposed that Fallen Leaf Lake is an important microcosm of Lake Tahoe. It is a "real world" working model of Lake Tahoe that can effectively be used to develop concepts, methods, instrumentation, monitoring approaches and complex models that are essential to understanding and solving problems throughout the Lake Tahoe Basin. It has been shown that research being conducted in the Fallen Leaf Lake watershed will be applicable to Lake Tahoe, including the development of new sensor technology.
It is also very important to develop a plan whereby local residents who have a "stake" in the Lake Tahoe Basin can serve as "citizen samplers". The "buy-in" by these residents provides them with a first hand knowledge of the problems and proposed solutions. This helps create the broad public support needed to successfully raise money and effect solutions. This plan is now being developed at Fallen Leaf Lake and will be extended to Lake Tahoe as it matures and the "bugs" are worked out.
Article: A Study of Ancient Trees Rooted 36.5 m (120’) Below the Surface Level of Fallen Leaf Lake, California
kleppe@ee.unr.edu
Updated: 8/31/2005
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John N. Louie
Associate Professor of Seismology
Geological Sciences,
Mackay School of Earth Sciences and Engineering
Research
Shallow to regional crustal geophysical studies of geological structure below Lake Tahoe. A paper on the Sierra Nevada crustal root was recently published: John N. Louie, Weston Thelen, Shane B. Smith, Jim B. Scott, Matthew Clark, and Satish Pullammanappallil, 2004, The northern Walker Lane refraction experiment: Pn arrivals and the northern Sierra Nevada root: Tectonophysics, 388, no. 1-4, 253-269. This paper is available at www.seismo.unr.edu/ftp/pub/louie/geothermal/walker.html
Further materials can be found at www.seismo.unr.edu/~louie
louie@seismo.unr.edu
Updated: 12/21/2004
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Glenn C. Miller
Professor of Environmental Sciences
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Marine engines, particularly two-stroke engines, generally do not have the same emissions controls as automobile engines. These engines also usually emit exhaust directly into the water, and thus transfer both gasoline and other products of incomplete combustion (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons-PAH) into the water that present a risk to humans and aquatic organisms. Over the previous 6 years, we have investigated the presence and source of these petroleum products in the water and sediment of Lake Tahoe. Our research has resulted in regulatory changes for use of carbureted two-stroke engine use on the lake, based on the relative emissions of various engines of unburned gasoline. We have also completed a major study on the sources, effects and fate of PAH in Lake Tahoe. In the past two years, we have extended this research to include run-off from streets and parking lots around Tahoe and are investigating the effectiveness of sedimentation basins for retention of engine emissions.
gcmiller@unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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W. Wally Miller
Professor of Soils and Hydrology
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Dr. Miller and his students have been studying nutrient transport and water quality in watersheds of the Lake Tahoe Basin for over 25 years. They have most recently focused on the impacts of fire. Since fire is a recurring phenomenon in most western forests, a long-term perspective is needed for understanding its effects on watershed ecosystems. This is complicated by the fact that fire regimes have likely varied over time according to climatic and anthropogenic influences (e.g. native American burning), fire suppression, and modern fire management practices, as well as over space according to a variable fuel mosaic shaped by landscape heterogeneity in vegetation, topography and climate. Our current findings suggest that the heavy build-up of forest floor litter may therefore be a significant contributor to the decline in Lake Tahoe water clarity. The overriding goal of this research is to formulate an adaptive management strategy for improving water quality in the Lake Tahoe Basin and eastern Sierra Nevada that incorporates the protection and effective management of critical watershed values.
wilymalr@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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Klaus Moeltner
Assistant Professor
Resource Economics,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Dr. Moeltner is a Resource Economist and Applied Econometrician with the Department of Resource Economics at the University of Nevada, Reno. His research interests include the economic analysis of recreational activities on public lands. He has been involved in several research projects in the Tahoe region in recent years, including the economic aspects of managing jet skiing at Sierran Lakes, a time-of-day analysis of recreation chocies of visitors and locals in the Tahoe Basin, and the potential economic effects on anglers and local communities of aquatic nuisance species in the Truckee watershed.
Home page: www.ag.unr.edu/moeltner
moeltner@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 9/21/2005
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Robert G. Qualls
Associate Professor of Wetlands Ecology
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Research in our laboratory concentrates on measuring the availability of various sources of phosphorus for algal growth in Lake Tahoe. Phosphorus is currently the factor limiting the growth of algae and the consequent loss of clarity in the Lake. Current regulatory efforts are focusing on limiting the inputs of total quantity of P to Lake Tahoe. However, only a small percentage of some sources is biologically available while a large percentage of P from other sources is available. Sources we are measuring include: suspended particles in streamwater, urban runoff, and road abrasive, erodable bank sediments, dissolved organic P in water, atmospheric deposition, particles settling in the lake, and suspended plankton. We also are using this data to develop equations expressing the rate of cycling of these sources of P for inclusion in the Lake Tahoe Clarity Model.
qualls@unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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C. Elizabeth Raymond
Professor
History,
College of Liberal Arts
Research
With photographer Peter Goin, I collaborated on a history of Lake Tahoe landscape in STOPPING TIME: A REPHOTOGRAPHIC SURVEY OF LAKE TAHOE (University of New Mexico Press, 1992). In that work we explored the cultural history of the Lake Tahoe landscape, and interpreted it as complex result of numerous human decisions that had consequences both intentional and inadvertent. I take a similar approach in my course on Lake Tahoe Landscapes, History 488b/688b (PDF requires Adobe Reader).
raymond@unr.edu
Updated: 3/3/2006
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Laurel Saito
Assistant Professor of Hydrology
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Dr. Saito has been collaborating with the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) Nevada Basin and Range Study Unit of the National Water Quality Assessment (NAWQA) program to understand anthropogenic impacts on the Truckee River aquatic ecosystem which headwaters in the Sierras and at Lake Tahoe. We have collected stable isotope samples of the food web (i.e., fish, macroinvertebrates, and periphyton) from Farad, California to Nixon, Nevada over the past two years. We are using a GIS assessment of urbanization and other land uses along these reaches with the data and food web models constructed from these samplings to assess the utility of the stable isotope and passive samplers for aiding bioassessment and understanding anthropogenic impacts to the Truckee River. In another study of the Gondola Fire on the south shore of Lake Tahoe, analyses of soil samples indicated an apparent change in the carbon and nitrogen stable isotope signatures between sampling dates and soil horizons (i.e., ash versus mineral soil), suggesting a temporal effect of wildfires.
lsaito@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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Sherman Swanson
Associate Professor of Rangeland and Riparian Management
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
To better assess the context and need for riparian and stream restoration a team of UNR faculty (myself and Paul Tueller) and students used air-born multi-spectral videography to identify the vegetation types along fifteen Lake Tahoe Basin streams, Upper Truckee, Trout, Big Meadow, Taylor, Meeks, Blackwood, Ward, Burton, Watson, Third, Marlette, Slaughterhouse, and Burke. To this information we added geomorphology data at three scales, watershed, stream reach and within channel. The channel reaches were classified using the Rosgen and Montgomery Buffington systems. All these data were linked and investigated to describe relationships among the classifications, and interpret the management and restoration needs before producing a set of CDs or WWW-based (www.tahoecons.ca.gov/library/rip_data/) reference files for use by agencies, land owners, planners, or others.
swanson@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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Jeffrey Underwood
Assistant Professor / NV State Climatologist
Geography,
College of Science
Research
Research in the Tahoe area include the first large scale analysis of lake-effect snow generated by Tahoe. This study which is near completion finds that the lake does indeed produce a lake-effect in the snowfall patterns in the region downwind of the lake. This is significant as prior research claimed that a lake must have an 80km fetch to produce lake-effect snowfall. Lake Tahoe's maximum fetch is much less than 80km but the water temperture is much warmer than those seen in the east (Great Lakes).
jeffu@unr.edu
Updated: 5/1/2006
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Stephen B. Vander Wall
Associate Professor
Biology,
College of Science
Research
My research focuses on the terrestrial habitat that surrounds Lake Tahoe. My research attempts to understand the role of plant-animal interactions in coniferous forest communities. More specifically, I am interested in mutualistic interactions between birds or rodents and pines where seeds are the focal point of the interaction. I've chosen this area of research because animals through their handling of seeds can have important and often unappreciated consequences for plant populations, and the evolutionary responses of the plant to the animals can have important implications for the animal populations. Further, these interactions can have pervasive, indirect effects on many other components of the community. Understanding these interactions will lead us to a deeper understanding of the structure and functioning of communities.
sv@unr.edu
Updated: 1/10/2005
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Mark Walker
Associate Professor of Watershed Hydrology
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Accumulated wastes from canines may represent a significant source of pathogenic microbes in surface waters. Companion animals may be carriers of pathogens such as Cryptosporidium and Giardia that survive relative well in feces left on the soil. In areas where tributary waters flow through exercise sites accumulations of feces may represent a risk to human health, especially if they enter Lake Tahoe near intakes for public drinking water supplies. The goal of our research is to characterize the risk posed to public drinking water supplies by accumulated dog feces in a popular exercise area that is tributary to Lake Tahoe adjacent to a public drinking water supply intake. Objectives include estimating loading rates of fecal matter through time, evaluating the potential link with occurrence of indicator organisms in water samples and assessing degradation rates of indicator organisms under different evapotranspiration conditions.
mwalker@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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Roger F. Walker
Professor of Forestry
Natural Resources & Environmental Science,
College of Agriculture, Biotechnology, and Natural Resources
Research
Dr. Walker has been studying forest health in the Lake Tahoe Basin and eastern Sierra Nevada since 2000 with three research sites, one on the south shore of the Lake Tahoe Basin in mixed conifer, one on the north shore in mixed conifer, and the third on the Tahoe National Forest near Truckee in east side yellow pine. The former site is the Gondola Wildfire site while the latter two involve adaptive management treatments including thinning, prescribed fire, and ground fuels manipulations. Variables examined include overstory and understory vegetation responses, bark beetle infestation, dwarf mistletoe infection, white pine blister rust, and wildfire fuels responses, with the latter directed toward development of defensible fuel profile zone strategies.
walker@cabnr.unr.edu
Updated: 10/20/2004
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