Alpine Channel and Floodplain Dynamics in the Lake Tahoe Region, California

Alpine floodplains provide diverse habitat components for terrestrial and aquatic species, and strongly influence bank stability and channel migration processes. They also present complex restoration challenges. Several systems in the Lake Tahoe region have been diagnosed with incised channel conditions that generate excessive mobile sediment from eroding banks, degrade riparian vegetation communities, and diminish floodplain wetland abundance and quality. Conventional efforts to restore these systems focus on reconnecting floodplains, primarily through channel or floodplain modifications designed to reestablish floodplain inundation frequency near a Q1.5 level. Recent observations along lower Squaw Creek and the Upper Truckee River suggest that human impacts and climate-induced shifts over the 20th Century appear to significantly change the processes and dynamics between channels and floodplains. Our observations highlight differences in alpine settings as compared with lowland environments. Increased rain-on-snow frequency appears to increase the importance of avulsion and channel widening processes over channel meander processes. Loss of channel sinuosity, increases in depth and changes in channel shape appear to follow rain-on-snow events. These changes affect the overall sediment transport regime, even as snowmelt duration continues to exert the primary influence over dominant discharge relationships. During floods, discontinuous, proximal deposition of coarse sediment replaces uniform, distal deposition of finer sediments, altering the structure of the channel bed and floodplain. Early snowmelt from developed hillslopes saturates floodplains even in the absence of regular flooding, potentially negating or eliminating the restorative benefit of increased flood frequency. These results suggest that effective long-term restoration strategies cannot rely on historic sinuosity patterns or simple flood frequency metrics, but must begin to understand how changes in sediment transport processes affect the dynamics between the floodplain and channel, and how these dynamics establish the basis for a self-organizing environment.