Crisis at the Salton Sea: Research Gaps and Opportunities

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The Salton Sea—a hypersaline, terminal lake in southern California—is in crisis. A combination of mismanagement and competition among federal, state and local agencies has hindered efforts to address declining lake levels and unstable water chemistry. This delay has heightened the public health threat to regional communities as retreating shorelines expose dry lakebed— a source of potentially toxic dust—while aquatic ecosystems face collapse due to rising salinity and oxygen loss. Although state agencies are making efforts to mitigate the problems, the scientific assumptions informing current management practices are outdated or lacking entirely, making outcomes unpredictable at best.