The Burnett County Land & Water Conservation Department has a number of lake watershed management projects designed to evaluate and reduce the pollutant loads to the lakes. Determining best management practices (BMPs) helps combat phosphorus delivery, one of the most important issues facing their lakes. Burnett County needed to evaluate the efficacy of their BMPs.
The project included an evaluation of available models, development of lake and land use maps for the project areas, development of a GIS user interface to run the model, and an evaluation of model results. For this project, the US-EPA Phosphorus Coefficient Model was selected. The model was fully integrated, and land use data was created. An easy-to use graphical user interface was then developed to make use of the digital data as well as user input values for remaining model parameters.
The interface allows users to change land use values within the drainage area and immediately calculate the resulting estimated phosphorus delivery. In addition, model runs can be sent to an ArcView layout and printed for future reference or planning.