Nature Conservancy representative says there's no agreement about health of Great Salt Lake

OGDEN — For humans, gauging health starts with the vital signs: pulse, blood pressure, temperature, respiratory rate.

But imagine if the patient is 75 miles long and 35 miles wide.

Getting an answer about the health of the Great Salt Lake likely depends on whom you ask. Sportsmen, mineral extractors, brine shrimpers, birders and others all have differing views about lake use priorities and preferences.

"We recognize and appreciate all these uses, even though they're not our focus, but we do think all these beneficial uses and our interests do share something in common, and that is they all benefit from a healthy lake," Chris Montague of The Nature Conservancy told the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council on Thursday.

The conservancy wants a measurable definition of Great Salt Lake health that could be incorporated into all state planning and management activities, he said.

"If we don't ever have a real definition of health, then we will never know whether we're moving toward health or away from health, and we'll never be confident that we're making all these decisions about the lake with the best information," said Montague, an alternate member of the council.

Representatives of the brine shrimp and minerals extraction industries briefed the council Thursday about their use of the lake and mentioned how changes in lake water levels and other factors affect their costs and ultimately their viability.

For example, Don Leonard, a council representative from the brine shrimp industry, said maintaining a high-quality product is "dependent upon a healthy resource and healthy ecosystem." Among factors affecting product quality are levels of pollutants, salinity and nutrients in the algae produced by sewage treatment plants, Leonard said.

Another common theme from Thursday's meeting was that while the council was deluged with statistics and other information about the lake from various stakeholders, lots more information still needs to be gleaned about the salty giant.

Montague argued that the various management plans undertaken by government entities do not include a health analysis of the entire lake system, that scientific data for optimal decision-making are lacking, that there has been no tracking of the cumulative effects of various permitted uses of the lake, and that there is no overall plan for preserving or restoring the lake's key processes.

e-mail: bwallace@desnews.com