Evaluating the Runoff Retention of a Key-Point Pond Design for a Property in Chelan County, WA
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Evaluating the Runoff Retention of a Key-point Pond Design For a Property in Chelan County, WA Liam Christman | March 12th, 2021 | CE 413 Winter 2021 http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~christml/ Introduction: As the climate changes and resource availability becomes increasingly uncertain, individuals and organizations are looking to innovative land management techniques that help improve the resiliency of the natural systems that they depend on. Agriculture as a whole is responsible for much of the water consumption and carbon release globally. For agricultural land managers, building resilient systems means sustaining access to natural resources, most importantly soil and water. Although soil and water conservation practices have been around as long as agriculture, recently defined techniques in permaculture and agroforestry are showing promise as methods for ensuring water-security, soil and ecological productivity, and the overall sustainability of agriculture (Yeomans 1993). Figure 1. Yeomans’ drawings depicting keyline and keyline dams in the topography. This analysis aims to evaluate the hydrologic impact of a key permaculture design element known as the key-point pond (see Figure 1). Specifically, it will use geospatial data to locate and determine the capture potential of a keypoint-pond installed at a property in Chelan County, WA. The pond is intended to capture and retain surface runoff as a part of a Keyline Design strategy. Developed to resist draught by Australian engineer and farmer P.A. Yeomans in the early 1940s, Keyline Design is intended to use natural topographic features to improve on-site water availability and increasing annual soil-water storage (Kitsteiner 2015). The target property in this analysis is being evaluated as a prospective site for a client interested in agroforestry. In a region with inconsistent precipitation, understanding the potential availability and consumption of water resources for this system is critical for prospective land managers seeking to begin an agricultural venture. Multiple case studies have shown that the availability of water for irrigation can be largely increased for a property with a strategically placed dam/pond (Vico et al 2020). However, runoff capture reuse for irrigation has the potential to change the greater watershed hydrology by altering a property’s areal contribution to downslope drainages. Diverting the runoff for agriculture may reduce flow to natural streams. Substantial changes in seasonal stream discharge could have significant impacts on local stream ecology. Objectives: 1. According to keyline design principles: identify the keyline and key-points in the primary valleys of the property using slope information from the highest resolution DEM data available. 2. Given that the dams are expected to be 3 m tall and ~70 m wide: estimate the contributing area and potential for average annual water storage for the key-point ponds based on expected % runoff. Assume all captured runoff could be consumed for irrigation within the year. 3. Estimate the significance of change, due to the pond installation, on stream flow contribution to Chumstick Creek from nearby 2nd Creek (the property drains to 2nd Creek which is a tributary to Chumstick Creek). Site Description: This geospatial analysis is for a potential agroforestry system designed for a semi- forested land parcel that is currently for sale in Chelan County, Washington. The property is just north of Leavenworth near the town of Chumstick. Site Columbia River Figure 2. Vicinity map of the site marked in green east of the Cascade Mountains. The property is 82 acres of temperate evergreen forest on a hillslope just east of the Cascade Mountain Range (see Map 1 for more property details). This area receives approximately 34 inches of annual rainfall according to PRISM data retrieved from a USGS Stream Stats report of the area. Most of this precipitation occurs outside of the summer months when this region is hot and dry. The site consists of moderately steep north facing slopes that range from 1% in the valleys to 55% on the ridges. The average slope over the property is 30%. The most common soil type on the property is the Shaser series consisting of stony, ashy, and sandy loam. According to the NRCS Web Soil Survey, the soil on the property is classified as hydrologic groups C and D. The current land cover is primarily pine tree forest canopy with more dense forest near the drainages. The two primary valleys existing on the property offer an excellent opportunity for runoff collection via hillside dams (see Fig. 3). Primary Valleys Figure 3. View of the primary valleys (blue lines) on the property (red polygon) Data Description: Data Dataset Data Usage Projection Resolution source Type Determine site slope, flow 1/3 arcsec NED raster direction, and GCS of NA 1983 ~10 m DEM accumulation information WA Determine Land State shapefile property site GCS of NA 1983 N/A Parcels GIS boundary Display local NHD Watershed shapefile GCS of NA 1983 N/A watershed Display local NHD Flowlines shapefile GCS of NA 1983 N/A streams Used for Stream precipitation and USGS Stats Basin report GCS of NA 1983 N/A discharge Delineation estimates GIS Methods: 1. Imported the data. This included NED, NHD, and WA Land Parcel Data. 2. Projected all datasets to NAD83 UTM Zone 10. This ensured spatial consistency between datasets. 3. Extracted the property polygon from the Land Parcel dataset. 4. Extracted Chumstick Cr Watershed from NHD Watershed dataset. 5. Used ArcGIS ready-to-use Watershed delineation tool to delineate 2nd Creek Watershed ( NHD dataset did not include it). 6. Clipped/Extracted by Mask all data to 2nd Creek Watershed. 7. Converted DEM raster to flow direction and flow accumulation rasters 8. Converted DEM raster to slope raster. 9. Created 5m and 10m contour maps from 2nd Creek Watershed elevation data. 10. Manually created flowlines to represent primary valleys based on 5m contours and flow accumulation. 11. Created points along primary valley flowlines every 5m and added surface information to points including slope and elevation. 12. Plotted point elevations as a function of horizontal distance from bottom to top of valley flowline to visualize surface profile. 13. Selected point with the largest slope attribute (This is the inflection point where surface goes from concave to convex). 14. Selected a point below but near the inflection point with the gentlest slope. 15. Manually created polylines through the key-points and perpendiculars to the valley flow paths to represent the two earthen key-point dams. Assigned surface information to the dam lines. 16. Converted dam lines to a raster feature and reclassified NODATA values to 0. 17. Used Con tool to change the elevation of raster cells along dam lines that are below the desired dam height to the designed dam elevation of 685m (3m above the valley elevation at the key point). 18. Replaced DEM raster cells along the dam line with the ‘design’ elevation to represent the dam. 19. Recalculated flow direction and accumulation to show effects of dam installation. 20. Used flow accumulation raster cells above the dam to estimate total contributing area and fraction of 2nd Creek Watershed total area. 21. Estimated the total volume of potential runoff capture at this site over the year according to the SCS curve method. Figure 4. Flow Chart of Major Processing Steps Results: The locations of the key-points (brown) were found downslope from the inflection point (red) and can be seen along the keyline (white-dotted contour line) in the aerial view of the site in Figure 5. Locations of the same points are seen in the profile view (Fig. 6). Figure 5. Location of key-points, keyline, inflection point, and primary valleys. The derived surface slope at the key-point is approximately 25%. While still steep, this location had the gentlest slope indicating a shelf for potential water deposition with the addition of a dam. 830 780 730 680 630 Elevation (m) Elevation 580 0 20 40 60 80 100 Horizontal Distance (m) Figure 6. Slope derived surface profile along west-most primary valley. Flow accumulation pre and post dams shows the potential impact on surface flow in the valleys. The flow accumulation threshold was set to display flow lines above a 50 and 750 cell threshold. In Figure 6 below, cells with accumulation below the 50-cell threshold are not shown, between 50 and 750 are shown in light blue, and greater than 750 is shown in dark blue which is the lowest value needed to display the primary valley discharges into Second Creek. Flow from the eastern primary valley never reaches Second Creek. Figure 7. Comparison of flow accumulation before (left) and after (right) addition of dams. With the dams burned into the DEM, flow accumulation is reduced downstream of the dam lines as expected. As evident in Figure 7, this only restricts the flow ~50 m downstream of the dam before the accumulation returns to the 50-cell threshold. At 10 m x 10 m cells this threshold is 50 * 100 m2 = 5,000 m2 of contributing area. Using this same calculation of area based on cell resolution, the upstream contributing area to accumulated flow that goes through key-point location (Fig. 8) was determined for each dam. These values are reported in Table 1. Figure 8. Flow Accumulation (number of contributing cells) at key-point dam. Runoff was estimated via the SCS Curve method. A runoff to rainfall percentage of 50% was estimated based on soil hydrologic conditions and forested land cover. This resulted in a curve number of 75 which estimated the monthly rainfall average (4 in) to produce a runoff depth of 2 in. Annual Contributing Area to Contributing Area Annual Precipitation Estimated Annual Capture Pond Pond (m2) (square miles) (m) Runoff (m) Potential (m3) West 667 0.00026 34 in ~ 0.9 m 0.45 300 East 972 0.00038 34 in ~ 0.9 m 0.45 437 Total 1639 0.00063 -- -- 738 Table 1.