After spending the past month at Siberia's Lake Baikal, 17 students in a unique environmental exchange program will journey to the Sierra Nevada next week to help preserve the Lake Tahoe basin. Students participating in the Tahoe-Baikal Institute spend 10 weeks exploring ecology and limnology, environmental restoration and planning, and resource economics at two of the world's most unusual freshwater lakes. The institute is co-sponsored by UC Davis and other groups including the League to Save Lake Tahoe and California Tahoe Conservancy. Institute students come primarily from Russia and the United States. "In its eighth year, the exchange program has matured in every sense. We are now able to select the very best students from a very large pool of highly qualified applicants. They are likely to become wise stewards of their countries' limited water and terrestrial resources," says Charles Goldman, a UC Davis professor and principal investigator for the UC Davis Tahoe Research Group. Institute participants this year include seven Americans, seven Russians, two Mongolians, and one German, all of whom must speak some English and some Russian, according to program guidelines. Translators help out when needed, says Karen Smallwood, an institute coordinator. While working in the Lake Tahoe area, institute students will help the Tahoe Research Group by taking water samples, help assess stream health by monitoring aquatic invertebrates in an area under restoration, analyze a newly designated reserve area for use as an interpretive trail and create and analyze a survey to determine what factors affect transit choices made by travelers bound for Lake Tahoe. In late August, Goldman and others including Douglas Wheeler, secretary of resources for California, and Trish Ronald, Tahoe Baikal Institute board chair, will travel to Russia, where they will spend a week at Lake Baikal working with Russians on environmental policy development.