Description or Abstract
The Lake Tahoe Basin is one of the most conserved landscapes in California, with about 85% of the Basin preserved as open space under public ownership. Yet such public ownership does not inherently confer protection from wildfire, drought, or other environmental stressors. Across California, active and dynamic management is needed to address shifting landscape mosaics resulting from changing land use patterns, climate, and fire. State conservation and restoration efforts like the 30x30 Initiative and the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force Action Plan are seeking robust and reliable methods and data to better understand the status and change of ecosystem conditions, but existing programs do not adequately track floristic biodiversity. The Tahoe Environmental Observatory Network (TEON) is a newly established biophysical monitoring system for the Lake Tahoe basin which provides a taxonomically extensive model that includes tracking plant community structure, composition, and diversity. We present TEON as a model monitoring program to efficiently track multi-taxa biodiversity, along with interdependent ecosystem characteristics, across large and varied landscapes over time. TEON is an extension of a project implemented in 2002, and we leverage that original dataset to describe how the basin has changed over the past two decades. Forest and lentic plant community data were collected, collocated with wildlife data, during two sampling periods over the 23-year timeframe (2002-2004 vs. 2024-2025). We found subtle but significant changes in plant communities that may identify emerging threats to whitebark pine, forest health, and wildlife habitat in the Lake Tahoe Basin.
Presenter Bios
Shale Hunter
US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station
Shale is a Biological Scientist and Data Manager with the US Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, where he leads the data collection and analysis components of the Tahoe Environmental Observatory Network. Shale is passionate about data-driven approaches to conservation and ecological monitoring, which has led to a Masters of Environmental Data Science from UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, as well as many years spent working on national and regional monitoring frameworks across New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, and of course California.
DateThursday, February 5
