While a significant amount of research and monitoring has been accomplished at Lake Tahoe, it has only been in recent years that the institutional commitment has been made to focus this work on specific management issues. This integration is now being done at the scientific (ecosystem) level as well as among research institutions, scientific community, land and resource managers and policy decision makers. The focus of this collaboration has been to facilitate conversion of applied science into management action.

Recently, June 2001 and updated in September 2002, the Lake Tahoe Science Advisory Group, in conjunction with numerous state, federal and local agencies, and a number of active working groups in the Tahoe Basin have identified critical information needs that must be supplied for effective management decisions.

Science and Research in Lake Tahoe was developed as part of a collaborative process involving state, federal, regional and local agencies and research institutions. In 2001, land and resource management agencies identified key research and monitoring activities that were needed for the restoration of the Lake Tahoe watershed. This process was informed by and integrated with the Lake Tahoe Science Advisory Group (SAG), which compiled an initial set of Key Science and Management Questions and developed the Lake Tahoe Science Plan, which incorporated existing knowledge and described outlying tasks needed to answer the key questions.

The evolution of these information needs was based on many events/efforts, including but not limited to, guidance previous and ongoing research, the 1997 Presidential Forum at Lake Tahoe, the U.S. Forest Service´s Watershed Assessment, the Lake Tahoe Science Symposia, establishment of the Lake Tahoe Science Advisory Group, approval of the Tahoe Environmental Science System under which the signature research institutions agree to share knowledge and facilities, the establishment of numerous working groups which discuss specific technical issues (e.g. LTIMP, Water Quality Working Group, Forest Health Consensus Group, Air Quality Modeling Group and many others), and literally hundreds of meetings between interested agencies, research institutions and public stakeholders.

The EIP process has also resulted in substantial funding commitments for Science and Research activities. The intensified and accelerated restoration effort embodied in the EIP requires an equally intense and accelerated effort to gather, analyze, integrate and disseminate scientific and technical information. Such information provides the science-based platform to guide policy decisions necessary to achieve environmental thresholds.