Pacific Southwest Research Station

Research TopicsLarge Landscape Restoration

Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership

A map of the project area for the Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership.

The Lake Tahoe West Restoration Partnership (Lake Tahoe West) is an interagency, multi-jurisdictional initiative that includes stakeholder participation and a science team. Its primary goal is to restore and maintain the resilience of the forests, watersheds, recreational opportunities, and communities in the western part of the Lake Tahoe basin.

Resilience refers to managing the landscape in ways that enhance its capacity to withstand drought, climate change, wildfire, increased visitor use, bark beetles, and other stressors, without the loss of its ecological processes and its cultural, recreational, and economic values.

The role of science in Lake Tahoe West is to provide objective, impartial information that informs decision-making. The initiative's secondary goal is to develop an approach to landscape restoration that can be replicated in and customized to remaining parts of the Lake Tahoe Basin, and the Sierra Nevada generally.

The U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station has taken the lead in building a collaborative science team that includes scientists from eight universities and three Forest Service research stations. The science team has examined a broad array of resource values, including forest health, wildfire effects, air quality, hydrology, water quality, wildlife, and economics.

Reports

Summary report of key findings: Lake Tahoe West Science Summary Report

Road-related erosion:

• Erosion from road network in Lake Tahoe West
• Modeling the effect of reopening abandoned roads in the Blackwood Watershed on hydrology and soil loss
• Estimates of Surface and Mass Erosion Following the 2016 Emerald Wildfire

Recorded webinar presentations

Visit the NFF LTW site for more information.

Journal Articles

Forest resilience:

• Longer-term impacts of fuel reduction treatments on forest structure, fuels, and drought resistance in the Lake Tahoe Basin https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.118609

Aspen restoration:

• Simulated Fire Behavior and Fine-Scale Forest Structure Following Conifer Removal in Aspen-Conifer Forests in the Lake Tahoe Basin, USA

Water availability and snow:

• Using Process Based Snow Modelling and Lidar to Predict the Effects of Forest Thinning on the Northern Sierra Nevada Snowpack https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2020.00021
• Increasing the efficacy of forest thinning for snow using high‐resolution modeling: A proof of concept in the Lake Tahoe Basin, California, USA https://doi.org/10.1002/eco.2203

Applications available via Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) Moscow Forestry Sciences Laboratory

Researchers have developed two customized applications of the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) model for use by land managers to assess the effects of forest management on surface runoff, soil erosion, and phosphorus from various hillslopes and watersheds around the Basin:

The Tahoe Basin Sediment Model (TBSM) interface gives users the option to run fine-scale simulations for a single hillslope with buffers.

The Lake Tahoe WEPP Watershed GIS Interface (WEPPcloud Lake Tahoe) features aggregated results from various scenarios (e.g. undisturbed, uniform low, moderate, high severities, wildfire, thinning, etc.) from 70 watersheds around the Basin in both text (.csv) and GIS (.shp) formats, as well as a link to viz-WEPPcloud, a visualization tool that allows users to further visualize and interpret results from the aggregated scenarios.

Additional research from the Tahoe Science Program funded by SNPLMA

A tremendous amount of scientific research has been conducted as part of an earlier science partnership supported by the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act program. For information on the findings from that research, visit the Tahoe Science Program webpage.