Madison County Lake Quality

Madison County has 3 monitored lakes — a thin enough sample that one or two stressed lakes can move the county average noticeably. Use the per-lake pages below for what actually matters. Every one of those lakes carries recent nutrient and algae readings, so the county-level summary covers the full set rather than a monitored subset. For Madison County the spread behind the average matters more than the average itself: a few nutrient-rich lakes among many clear ones produce the same figure as the inverse.

The county's lakes lean shallow, which makes the readings sensitive to wind, sediment-resuspension, and any nutrient inputs from the watershed. The cleanest measured lake is Owsley Fork Reservoir.