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Show August 31, 1999 Kathleen Clarke Executive Director Department of Natural Resources 1594 West North Temple, Suite 3710 Salt Lake City, Utah 84114 Dear Ms Clarke, We appreciate the opportunity to have participated with the Department of Natural Resources ( DNR) in a review of the scientific underpinnings of " Great Salt Lake, Comprehensive Management Plan ~ Planning Document." The DNR has on its staff some of the authorities on Great Salt Lake ( GSL) and it was a pleasure for us to work with them. We have informally shared our thoughts directly with the Planning Team. Following are six perspectives that we believe will assist you in providing leadership to the development of the draft Planning Document. 1- Knowledge pays off. The information collected on the water balance, salt balance, and lake fluctuations of GSL provides a narrow but adequate underpinning for much of the discussion in the Planning Document. Without the decades of monitoring of lake levels and salinity of GSL the scientific foundation would be woefully inadequate for defending management decisions. Much is known about the lake, but there is a great deal we do not know. The elevation of the lake surface has been monitored for over a century. The State has a relatively good information base for the salt balance of the lake based on monitoring of lake salinity since construction of the causeway. There are, however, almost no comprehensive, integrated information bases for GSL ecosystems. The present relative ignorance, due to lack of data, about the ecosystems of the lake makes it very difficult to make management decisions designed to protect the ecosystems based on scientific reasoning. The DNR should support and expand monitoring programs and research to better understand natural and human- caused changes of the lake. All currently available data on the GSL should be accessible in electronic form. 2- The lake is a system of interlocking subsystems. The lake is several water bodies and differs as much east- west as north- south. The lake's physical, chemical, biological, ecological, economic, and social systems are dynamic and interact to influence the 230 |