Twenty international undergraduate and graduate students are spending the next few weeks in the Lake Tahoe basin to help with lake and watershed research in the ninth year of a unique environmental exchange program. After their work here, they will journey in August to Siberia's Lake Baikal. Students participating in the Tahoe-Baikal Institute spend 10 weeks exploring ecology and limnology, environmental restoration, resource economics, public policy and other fields at two of the world's most unusual freshwater lakes. As the students learn while at Lake Tahoe, news media are welcome to join them in the field. The institute, a non-profit organization established to help preserve Lake Tahoe and Lake Baikal, is co-sponsored by UC Davis and groups including the League to Save Lake Tahoe and the California Tahoe Conservancy. Institute students come primarily from Russia and the United States; this year, students from other nations including China, Germany and Venezuela have also joined the program. Students in the program are likely to "become wise stewards of their countries' limited water and terrestrial resources," says Charles Goldman, director of the UC Davis Tahoe Research Group. While at Tahoe, the students will work on projects such as taking water quality samples to study the invasive Eurasian water-milfoil weed; improving the Tahoe rim trail; and finding ways to educate the public about the Tahoe yellowcrest, a plant that appears on the verge of extinction, says Dorrie Panayotou, a graduate student in Goldman's lab and a student member of the Tahoe-Baikal Institute board of directors. Working at both lakes -- Tahoe and Baikal -- offers students an opportunity to compare two very different lakes, both renowned for their exceptional clarity and both threatened by human activities, says institute program coordinator Silke Roever.