The Great Salt Lake Food Chains Fragility and Resiliency

About this book

This booklet contains the text of Bonnie K. Baxter's lecture, delivered at the 2023 Wallace Stegner Symposium. This annual symposium honours the life and legacy of American novelist, writer, environmentalist, and historian Wallace Earle Stegner (1909–1993). The theme of the 28th annual symposium was "The Future of the Great Salt Lake".

Bonnie K. Baxter explains the trophic structure of the food chains of Great Salt Lake in northern Utah and the resulting impacts from recent years of a shrinking lake and corresponding increases in salinity. Moving from the foundational organisms to brine shrimp, flies, and ten million birds reliant on the lake, Baxter illuminates how salinity and desiccation can affect each level of a complex ecosystem. Presented in the context of current science, she explores the pressures of persistent water diversions and climate change and provides a cautionary tale of a lake on the brink of collapse. Baxter's hopeful tone, sounding the lake ecosystem's inherent resiliency, is a welcome voice in the climate conversation and a plea to help save a lake that can survive with a little help from its human neighbors.

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Biography

Bonnie K. Baxter is professor of biology and director of Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster University. She has authored dozens of scientific papers on the lake. She is co-editor of Great Salt Lake Biology: A Terminal Lake in a Time of Change and co-author of The Great Great Salt Lake Monster Mystery, a children's book.