The Watershed Atlas Project
Brian Lee, Department of Landscape Architecture
Corey Wilson, Department of Landscape Architecture
Collin Linebach, Department of Landscape Architecture
Drew Heering, Department of Landscape Architecture
Landscape Characterization in Kentucky
The Watershed Atlas Project
Brian Lee, Department of Landscape Architecture
Corey Wilson, Department of Landscape Architecture
Collin Linebach, Department of Landscape Architecture
Drew Heering, Department of Landscape Architecture
Landscape Characterization in Kentucky as an Indicator of Watershed Health
Assessing the landscape from a watershed and waterway health perspective provides an indication of the quality of an area's land management decisions. The Watershed Atlas Project is an approach to waterway and watershed health assessment that utilizes existing publicly available geospatial data (Kentucky Geography Network and related sites) to visualize landscape indicator aspects of multiple watersheds simultaneously. Initial grounding for this work can be found in An Ecological Assessment of the United States Mid-Atlantic Region: A Landscape Atlas (1997) and has been modified and expanded for The Watershed Atlas Project. By looking at landscapes as indicators to infer watershed health, it is possible to modify land management decisions for the future to improve water quality and reduce the risk of future threats, and understanding how watersheds are statistically similar or different (cluster analysis) can aide in mobilizing a suite of protection or mitigation strategies.
The Watershed Atlas Project uses the Hydrologic Unit Code (HUC) as the fundamental unit of analysis. HUC-14s are the smallest unit of the