The Utah Valley Earth Forum hosted an online public forum Tuesday night to discuss possibilities for the restoration of Utah Lake.

The forum — titled “Restoring Utah Lake: What is the Science?” — brought together a group of seven scientists from universities around the state to discuss the science behind ongoing restoration efforts.

Once a part of the vast Lake Bonneville, and now a shallow freshwater lake, Utah Lake has seen a huge transformation over the centuries.

“Utah Lake is the most distinctive natural feature that defines Utah Valley,” said James Westwater, UVEF chairman. “Since the mid-1800s when non-natives arrived in Utah, Utah Lake has suffered at our hands.”

The lake that once sustained the native peoples of Utah Valley and pioneer settlers from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has become prone to the growth of phragmites and dangerous algal blooms in recent years.

“Those were the homelands of the Uintah and Timpanogos and some of the other bands of the Ute Indian people,” said Forrest Cuch, a Ute Elder and former Director of Indian Affairs for the State of Utah. “It appears that 30% of our diet came from the fishery of Utah Lake, not only the suckers, but the Bonneville cutthroat trout was one of the main sources before the lake became polluted.”

According to Sam Rushforth, forum panelist and emeritus Dean of the UVU College of Science, some of the ecological issues Utah Lake faces today may have started with the pioneers overfishing and depleting wildlife populations.

“The initial harm to the lake came from early settlers in the valley,” he said. “The lake had some native species of trout, plus the June Sucker were very important species for protein for the early settlers.”

Rushforth added that the settlers’ early methods of irrigation didn’t protect against backflow into the lake, causing further damage to Utah Lake’s native species.

“The spawning beds got silted up, the lake got silted up, and those species began to disappear,” he said. The loss of those native species affected all who used the lake, from Utah Valley into the Salt Lake Valley.

Keith Hambrecht, an invasive species coordinator for the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, has been coordinating phragmite removal projects at both the Great Salt Lake and Utah Lake wetlands for the past six years. These projects have helped to create more plant diversity and, in turn, improve bird and pollinator habitats in those areas.

“We’ve significantly reduced phragmites cover,” he said. “For Utah Lake, we’ve reduced it by over 70%.”

Hambrecht also mentioned ongoing water quality studies and the Provo River Delta Restoration Project as efforts to restore Utah Lake.

In terms of future Utah Lake restoration projects, Kevin Shurtleff, a UVU chemistry professor, stated that efforts should be focused on returning the lake to what it once was, not trying to make it into something else entirely.

“A lot of people think that restoration means we’ll make the lake deep and clear, and you know, that just never has been in the past, and it’s really unlikely to happen in the future,” he said. “So I think we all have to get on the same page of what restoration means.”

Hambrecht commented that restoration efforts should also be focused on restoring the lake’s natural processes.

“We want to restore the processes that create the ecosystem,” he said. “Ecosystems are very dynamic, so we’re not aiming for ‘we’re going to engineer it into this specific steady state,’ the approach should be figuring out what the underlying processes are that create that ecosystem so that it can be resilient staying within the bounds of some healthy area within those processes.”

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