Abstract
The Lake Tahoe basin, located along the California and Nevada border between the Carson and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges, represents a complex forested ecosystem consisting of numerous sub-watersheds and tributaries that discharge directly to Lake Tahoe. This synthesis focuses on historical and current nutrient pools and the effects of biomass management in watersheds of the basin relative to their potential impacts on nutrient (N, P) related discharge water quality. An accumulating forest floor as a result of fire suppression has resulted in the build-up of large nutrient pools that now provide a “natural” source of long term nutrient availability to surface waters. As a consequence, stand and forest floor replacing wildfire may cause a large magnitude nutrient mobilization impact on runoff water quality. Hence, mechanical harvest and controlled burning have become popular management strategies. The most ecologically significant long-term effects of controlled fire appear to be the loss of C and N from the forest floor. Although the application of controlled fire may have some initial impact on overland/litter interflow nutrient loading, controlled burning in conjunction with mechanical harvest has the potential to improve runoff water quality by reducing N and P discharge and improving the overall health of forest ecosystems without the danger of a high intensity wildfire.
Highlights
The Lake Tahoe basin is located along the California and Nevada border at the western extreme of the Great Basin between the Carson and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges
We modeled the entire Lake Tahoe Basin, only the results for Jeffrey pine, mixed conifer, and chaparral potential natural vegetation (PNV) are presented here to characterize potential discharge water quality because they include 61.6% of land in the basin and exhibited substantial variability in response to fire and harvest
Pre-settlement ecosystems in the upper watersheds of the Lake Tahoe Basin are estimated to have been typified by much smaller N and P nutrient pools in the biomass compared to their present day counterparts
Summary
The Lake Tahoe basin is located along the California and Nevada border at the western extreme of the Great Basin between the Carson and Sierra Nevada mountain ranges. If we are to arrest continued deterioration of the lake’s famed water clarity, it is imperative that in addition to the current emphasis on urban sources of water pollution we strive to better understand the interdependence among watershed nutrient cycling, groundwater and streamflow, overland flow surface runoff, precipitation (type, intensity, duration), atmospheric deposition, wildfire and anthropogenic manipulations such as biomass management [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] The purpose of this synthesis paper is to focus on historic and current biomass conditions in the watersheds of the Lake Tahoe basin relative to their potential impacts on nutrient (N and P) related discharge water quality. Our objectives are to address: (1) a reconstruction (model estimated) of historic litter and nutrient pools compared to current conditions; (2) the effects of wildfire; (3) the effects of mechanical harvest and controlled burns; and (4) the corresponding biomass management implications
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