The purpose of this watershed analysis is to determine how much land surface area drains into a privately owned man-made lake in central Kentucky’s knob region. The lake is situated on a small, startup farm that is interested in irrigated some or all of the 2 acre food plot with runoff that is caught in the lake sustainably while maintaining a healthy aquatic ecosystem.
A watershed analysis was performed on the surrounding area through ArcGIS Pro. 5 meter Digital Elevation Models were collected and flow direction and flow accumulation were calculated with use of the software to determine the watershed using the lake as the pour point.
It was found that the watershed for the lake covered 0.093475 square miles and in an average year, over 16 million gallons of water falls over the watershed. The USGS estimates that around 30% of rainfall will run off into streams, lakes, and other bodies of water meaning that for every one inch that falls over the watershed area, 487,338 gallons of water will end up in the lake.
More analysis will need to be done to evaluate the fish population and how much water pollution from dirt the runoff from the area brings, but the study area for further evaluation has been determined by the current watershed analysis. It initially appears that sustainable irrigation can be done with lake containment water as long a crops are chosen whose watering requirements do not exceed the rain water accumulation.