External scientific resources
Curated agencies, maps, datasets, guidance and research tools for freshwater work in Kentucky — official Kentucky sources first. Each card says what the resource is for and when its link was last checked. Looking for journal articles? See the Research Paper Library.
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Water
Kentucky's official harmful algal bloom (HAB) program page: how the state monitors blooms, current recreational advisories, safety guidance for people and animals, and how to report a suspected bloom.
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Water
Entry point to the Division of Water's web map applications, including watershed and water-health viewers and the HAB viewer. Start here to see which state map tools exist before searching for a dataset.
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet
Interactive viewer for exploring Kentucky watersheds and the environmental and water-resource layers mapped within them. Useful for placing a stream such as Allen Branch inside its hydrologic units.
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Water
The Division of Water's catalog of downloadable GIS data and map services for hydrology, water quality and permitting in Kentucky.
Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet, Division of Water
Kentucky's surface-water monitoring programs, water-quality assessments and Integrated Reports, which state whether assessed waters support their designated uses.
Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources
Public guidance for anglers and boaters on cyanobacteria ("blue-green algae") in Kentucky lakes, including what blooms look like and how to reduce exposure for people, pets and harvested fish.
Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky
State geological survey: geologic maps, groundwater and water-well data, karst and sinkhole mapping, and springs. Essential for south-central Kentucky, where limestone karst can route water underground in ways surface maps do not show.
Kentucky Geological Survey, University of Kentucky
Downloadable Kentucky geology and geospatial datasets (shapefiles and data files), links to KGS map services and the KGS Geode search tools. Useful for QGIS projects such as overlaying geology and karst on a delineated drainage area.
Commonwealth Office of Technology, Division of Geographic Information
Kentucky's clearinghouse for geospatial data and web map services — hydrography, hydrologic units, land cover, imagery, roads and more.
Commonwealth of Kentucky, KyFromAbove program
Statewide aerial imagery and lidar-derived elevation data. High-resolution terrain models make small stream channels, valleys and sinkholes visible, which helps interpret where water can flow.
Commonwealth of Kentucky
Searchable catalog of downloadable Kentucky geographic datasets and web services (shapefile, GeoJSON, CSV and API access).
Western Kentucky University
Statewide network of research-grade weather stations. Use it to document recent rainfall and air temperature for a field visit instead of estimating them.
U.S. Geological Survey
Web application that delineates the drainage basin upstream of a clicked point and reports basin characteristics and, where regression equations exist, streamflow statistics. The tool for the Allen Branch upstream-drainage task.
U.S. Geological Survey
USGS viewer for topographic maps, the National Hydrography Dataset (streams and waterbodies), the Watershed Boundary Dataset, elevation and imagery.
U.S. Geological Survey
USGS monitoring locations in Kentucky with streamflow, water-level and water-quality observations.
Needs administrator review: The site refused the automated check (HTTP 403); confirm in a browser (checked 2026-11-05). The link has not been changed.
USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
Annual, crop-specific land-cover maps derived from satellite imagery. Useful for describing what is grown in a watershed — but mapped crops near a stream do not, by themselves, show that runoff reaches it.
Redirects to https://www.nass.usda.gov/research-and-science/cropland/viewer (external site, opens in a new tab) (checked 2026-11-05).
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
Official soil survey maps and interpretations: soil types, drainage class, erodibility and hydrologic soil group for any area of interest.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Authoritative introduction to what cyanobacteria are, how blooms form, which toxins they can produce, and how people and animals are exposed.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
How the National Aquatic Resource Surveys measure microcystins and how the results are interpreted against health-based benchmarks.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA's statistically designed national surveys of lakes, rivers and streams, wetlands and coasts — the reference point for comparing a local result with national conditions.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Plain-language view of state-reported assessment results for waters near any address, including whether waters are listed as impaired and why.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Satellite-derived estimates of cyanobacteria in larger U.S. lakes and reservoirs. Pixels are hundreds of meters wide, so it can say something about Lake Cumberland but nothing about a small stream.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Public-health guidance on illnesses linked to harmful algal blooms in people and animals, including symptoms and how to avoid exposure.
U.S. Geological Survey
The USGS standard procedures for collecting and processing water-quality samples and field measurements — temperature, pH, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, turbidity — including calibration and quality control.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
EPA's starting point for finding laboratories that identify cyanobacteria and measure cyanotoxins. Toxin testing for portal projects goes through qualified laboratories, never the teaching lab.
National Library of Medicine
Database of biomedical and life-science literature. Strong for cyanotoxins, toxicology and microbiology; search terms such as "microcystin AND Daphnia" work well.
National Library of Medicine
Free full-text archive of open-access journal articles — use it to read the full paper when PubMed shows only an abstract.
U.S. Geological Survey
Every USGS report and journal article, free to read. The place to find Scientific Investigations Reports and Open-File Reports on water quality and cyanobacteria.
Broad scholarly search across journals, theses and reports, with "cited by" links for following a topic forward in time. Always confirm details against the publisher or a DOI.
Needs administrator review: The site refused the automated check (HTTP 429); confirm in a browser (checked 2026-11-05). The link has not been changed.
Crossref
Look up a DOI or search by title to confirm authors, year, journal, volume and pages. Every DOI in this portal's bibliography was checked against Crossref.
GBIF Secretariat
Open global database of species occurrence records from museums, surveys and community science, searchable by taxon and map area.
Needs administrator review: The site refused the automated check (HTTP 403); confirm in a browser (checked 2026-11-05). The link has not been changed.
AlgaeBase (M.D. Guiry & G.M. Guiry, University of Galway)
Taxonomic and nomenclatural database for algae, including cyanobacteria. Use it to check current genus names and synonyms (for example, Anabaena → Dolichospermum for planktonic species).
Aerial imagery and 3-D terrain, including historical imagery for some areas. Good for reconnaissance; imagery interpretations are preliminary until confirmed in the field.
QGIS Project (Open Source Geospatial Foundation)
Free, open-source desktop GIS for combining stream lines, watershed boundaries, land cover and field points, and for real calculations such as land-cover percentages within a delineated basin.
iNaturalist (California Academy of Sciences & National Geographic Society)
Community platform for photographing and documenting organisms. Useful for macroinvertebrates and riparian plants; it is not a substitute for microscopic or molecular identification of cyanobacteria.
USGS, EPA and the National Water Quality Monitoring Council
Single search across water-quality data from federal, state, tribal and local agencies. Searchable by hydrologic unit — for example, the Lower Pitman Creek subwatershed that contains Allen Branch.
U.S. Geological Survey
Repository of USGS scientific datasets with full metadata — where the data behind many USGS reports can be downloaded.
Every link is checked by an automated script that identifies itself as this site's link checker. When a site refuses the automated check or cannot be reached, the card is marked Needs review and the link is left unchanged for an administrator to confirm in a browser; when a link redirects, the card shows the new destination. Links are never silently replaced.