Project Baseline: Lake Tahoe - Why New Millennium Divers became Citizen Scientists

Let us start with a common interactive scenario for Lake Tahoe:

40 years ago a family came to Lake Tahoe, walked to the water’s edge of a very full lake (on that day in 1975, Tahoe’s surface elevation was at 6228 feet), and said, “What a beautiful lake! Look how clear it is!” and they spent the rest of their vacation not knowing the environmental direction that Tahoe was heading.

Fast forward to 2015, that same family and their grandchildren return to Lake Tahoe, walk to the water’s edge and say, “What a beautiful lake! Look how clear it is!” not realizing that over the past 40 years the lakes clarity has diminished drastically, the trash and debris accumulating below the surface has grown exponentially and that the lake level is now 7 feet lower than their visit in 1975.

This scenario is an example of “generational environmental amnesia” a term coined by the volunteer members of the Global Underwater Explorers (GUE) environmental initiative, Project Baseline which is being managed in Lake Tahoe by New Millennium Dive Expeditions (NMDE) located in Reno, Nevada.

NMDE was established in 2001 to conduct research on the historic shipwrecks located upon Lake Tahoe’s bottom; there are 4. They visited the wreck site of the SS Tahoe several times between 2001 and 2010 and resulting from their documentation, the SS Tahoe was listed on the National Register of Historic Places; Nevada's first submerged cultural resource. Because the other 3 shipwrecks remaining in Tahoe are in depths of greater than 1400 feet NMDE must wait for funding and technology to become available in order to research these other sites. Wanting to stay active underwater within the Tahoe Basin, NMDE formed an alliance with GUE and joined Project Baseline. Through Project Baseline: Lake Tahoe, they developed a niche diving opportunity diving for the benefit of the scientific and regulatory agencies within the Tahoe Basin. As volunteer divers, functioning as “citizen scientists”, NMDE was able to execute highly result oriented and efficient support for the research occurring in the lake; all this as a result of NMDE volunteering in 2010 to manage Project Baseline: Lake Tahoe.

Project Baseline's Global mission is to, "empower passionate citizens to observe and record change within the world’s aquatic environments in a manner that fosters public awareness and supports political action". In 2010, NMDE established 4 underwater monitoring stations that would allow all divers to monitor depth, temperature, visibility and take a repeatable photo of the underwater environment for each site. That data is then transmitted to the main Project Baseline database, publically accessible to all, globally, where a “baseline” data set is being established in order to prevent this “generational environmental amnesia” along with providing vital information pertaining to the health of the world’s aquatic environments. The first 4 underwater stations in Tahoe are at Sand Harbor, Carnelian Bay, Hurricane Bay and Glenbrook Bay and this summer, 2015, NMDE will establish 4 additional stations at Bliss State Park, Camp Richardson, Tahoe Keys Area and Nevada Beach. Today we can see that the depth indicator, established in 2010 that read 26 feet at Sand Harbor now reads 19 feet as of November of 2014: a documented drop in the level of the lake, easily understandable by the community, of 7 feet.

Recently NMDE was involved with the Lake Tahoe Nearshore Community Structure Pilot Monitoring Project, conducted by the University of Nevada, Reno’s College of Sciences (UNR) and funded by a grant from the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) with support from the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection and Lahontan Water Quality Control Board. This project saw the first ever circumnavigation of Lake Tahoe to depths of between 6 and 25 feet (2 to 8 meters) within the Lakes "Nearshore" zone; a lake zone that is defined as approximately 350 linear feet out from the shoreline or to depths of about 40 feet (12 meters); the area most used for recreation, tourism and boating; a zone where underwater the clarity horizontally is on average 30 feet (9 meters) where in 1975 this clarity was over 50 feet (15 meters) on average. Why? Development? Crayfish? Shrimp? Storm Drains? A combination of all for sure but definitely a lacking environmental education.

There are over 90 agencies involved with the environmental aspects of the Tahoe Basin. NMDE is the only organization providing volunteer divers to aid and support the various agencies in need of diving to support their research efforts. In 2013 NMDE divers volunteered over 350 hours to UNR's Camp Richardson Chara Bed project where the divers were able to provide data showing a plant bed over .75 square miles in area. In 2014, the circumnavigation project added another 600 hours of volunteer dive time. Both projects highly beneficial to the scientists conducting underwater research in Tahoe. So...why did NMDE's divers become "Citizen Scientists"? Because as highly trained volunteer divers, the NMDE divers could execute the dives without restrictive bureaucracy and accomplish tasks, gather data and provide visual and verbal input that (2013)… "In 7 dives would have taken the scientists 5 years to accomplish"!

This coming summer (2015), NMDE will be involved in several projects in Tahoe, one will be to upgrade and recondition our underwater stations, educate the public on how they can become involved and execute several clean-up activities so please stay tuned to the NMDE website, www.nmde.org (a website where links to all NMDE activities are documented and published).