bark beetles

With dense vegetation spanning over 300 acres, the iconic Spooner Lake portion of Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park is increasingly susceptible to environmental disturbances threatening the health of the Tahoe Basin. State officials from forestry, parks and lands announced Thursday the closure of the Spooner Lake portion of Lake Tahoe Nevada State Park from Sept. 12 to Nov. 16 to address forest health issues.

LAKE TAHOE, Calif. - With an increase in the number of dead and dying trees in the Lake Tahoe region, Liberty Utilities has tripled the number of inspectors they use to identify trees that pose a risk to the utility’s infrastructure. The inspection program and subsequent removal of hazardous trees are designed to reduce the risk of power outages, potential wildfires, and to comply with State regulations.

The U.S. Forest Service Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit (LTBMU) is seeking comments on a proposal to reduce excess vegetation on approximately 3,800 acres of National Forest lands on the south end of the Lake Tahoe Basin in order to reduce the risk of wildland fires and create healthier forests.

There are now an estimated 102 million dead trees in California, creating unhealthy forests that are prone to major and catastrophic wildfires. Even though funds are being allocated to remove many of them, where will that timber go?
For now, there aren’t many options because of what has transpired from the government since 1968.

In that year the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior issued orders restricting the volume of timber that could be harvested from Federal lands in the West. It was updated in 1969 to limit the total harvested to 350-million-board-feet.

Prolonged drought periods often result in forest tree mortality, but this death varies across the Lake Tahoe Basin. The causes of tree mortality range from native bark beetles, forest pathogens (both native and invasive), stressors such as drought and salt stress, as well as historical land-use.

Natural forces and human actions have affected the lake's clarity, physics, chemistry and biology since 1968, when UC Davis first began continuous monitoring of Lake Tahoe.
Despite an extreme weather year, overall clarity at Lake Tahoe improved in 2011. Yet underlying trends portray a more complex picture of the Lake Tahoe ecosystem, according to the annual “Tahoe: State of the Lake Report 2012,” released today by the Tahoe Environmental Research Center at the University of California, Davis.