J.F. Sebastian

Pretty neat. And a very useful single image.

I think I saw it in one of Geoff Lawton's video series. Nearly anything is possible of course, but at some point the law of diminishing returns applies especially for broad scale construction: too expensive for too little gain.

The guideline i heard was 20%, but indeed you are correct, most of it is right around that grade or steeper. The soil does have a lot of clay, which probably makes things more feasable than if it were sandy at least.

This property and landscape is mostly suitable for pasture/silvopasture and livestock. It is a brittle landscape. Swales are critical here for slowing water and keeping it infiltrating on the property, and I think if it were affordable some keyline plow subsoil ripping would be very helpful...but those both store water in the soil (not a bad thing). Animals, irrigating individual sections during our dry summers, and fire protection (a real concern) on the other hand all require surface water, and that means a dam. High up means I can move the water where i want with gravity. Down low it would need to be pumped, which adds complexity, cost and maintenance.

I could put large cisterns up high on the hill (and probably will) but in this environment cold winters means they will freeze unless they are mostly underground...which makes installing them much more expensive.

Hey, that effect is awesome! I like it! That sort of thing could be quite helpful for a landowner, and definitely for a designer that they could show as part of their presentation to a client -- if you could streamline the process you could probably sell it.

A few observations:

* The lines aren't quite right, as you say. Overall it is quite good, but I see a few places where the water flow doesn't line up with what it should be doing based on the contour lines or the landscape. Doesn't matter here, as this model plus the contour maps give me a good idea of what is happening.

* I think it would be needed overall to take into account not just what falls on a property, but also rainfall onto the catchment area that *drains into* the property. In my case that isn't such a giant difference since I'm nearly at the top of the butte (and anyway I didn't give you maps that included that data), but in most cases this is where the majority of the flowing water comes from, and it can make modeling just the direct rainfall quite misleading depending on the terrain.

* If you could sanely model potetial dams and swale flows, that would be *extremely* helpful to people, I think

* Overall a steeper camera angle looking into the land is more useful (my opinion, at least). The tilt and pan is slick, but I expect the most valuable view is probably a top-down fixed look.

* I like it!

* I wish this property had better dam sites in the top half. The only natural spot my amateur eye sees in the top half is in a deeply forested gully/thicket, so damming it would be hard and overly disruptive. There is also a small spring or seep in there I think, which needs further exploration.

Yep, that terrain looks right. Indeed, tech projects are never as easy as they may first seem. That last 20% takes a lot longer than the first 80%

Yeah, sorry -- numbers not included The lines are 10 ft degradation. The far right near the bottom is a small peak, and the rest of the map is basically a hill descending from that (right to left). If it is too incomplete for you to work with, don't worry about it

I PM'd you a link to the files, since they're 10mb together. Let me know if that'll work for you.

Hi there! I just knocked the above images up in Sketchup -- I don't really know how to use it beyond the very basics, and the contour data is from Google Earth. I can certainly create the above at a much higher resolution -- the contour lines will still be 1px wide, so it should be more precise. How big do you need? Do you want the terrain removed (just contour)?