Kansas Lake Water Quality

Kansas lists 239 lakes across 82 counties, 188 of them with a recent water-quality reading. Most of that sampling flows through monitoring run by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, which feeds state, federal, and volunteer measurements into the EPA Water Quality Portal. The remainder are here because they are real named lakes, not because anyone has sampled them recently. Most measured Kansas lakes are productive, often shallow, and frequently algal in late summer; each lake page shows its own phosphorus and chlorophyll-a readings.

Cheney Lake is the largest lake in this index at about 28,000 acres, one of 32 here that clear 500 acres. The rest run smaller, and small and shallow is where nutrient loading shows up first, because there is less water to dilute it and the bottom sediment stays within reach of the sun. The measured lakes lean eutrophic, with enough nutrient input to support an active algal community and the trade-offs in clarity and dissolved oxygen that come with it. The county with the lowest nutrient and algae readings on average is Russell. The gap between counties is large enough that a single figure for Kansas lake water quality hides real local variation.