Nutrient and sediment transport in streams of the Lake Tahoe basin: a 30-year retrospective

Abstract

Lake Tahoe, widely renowned for its astounding clarity and deep blue color, lies at an elevation of 1,898 meters (m) in the central Sierra Nevada, astride the California-Nevada border. The volume of the lake is 156 cubic kilometers (km³), and its surface area is 501 square kilometers (km²), 38 percent of the total basin area of 1,313 km². The eutrophication of the lake has been studied intensively since the early 1960s (Goldman 2000), when scientists and farsighted political leaders and private citizens began to recognize that human activities, especially the accelerated input of nutrients and sediment, could cause long-term changes in the lake.

Parent Publication

• Proceedings of the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium

Citation

Coats, Robert. 2004. Nutrient and sediment transport in streams of the Lake Tahoe basin: a 30-year retrospective. In: Murphy, Dennis D. and Stine, Peter A., editors. Proceedings of the Sierra Nevada Science Symposium. Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-193. Albany, CA: Pacific Southwest Research Station, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture: 143-147