Colorado reservoir · state assessment record
Paonia Reservoir.
Assessment decisions reported by Colorado to EPA under Clean Water Act sections 303(d) and 305(b), last assessed in the 2022 reporting cycle.
- 318
- Assessed acres
- Lake / Reservoir / Pond
- Water type
- 6,375.9 ft
- Water Surface Elevation (provisional)
This waterbody in one line
Paonia Reservoir., a reservoir in Colorado, is assessed as fully supporting its designated uses, with no impairment causes listed in the state's most recent Integrated Report cycle (2022). By assessed acreage it sits in the upper quartile by assessed acreage nationally (38,628 lakes); its impairment list is shorter than on half of assessed lakes (0 listed causes). Aquatic life is assessed as fully supporting. A USGS gauge tracks its water surface elevation daily.
- Fully Supporting
- overall status
- P87
- Assessed size nationally
- P51
- Shorter cause list
- Fully Supporting
- aquatic life
Assessment verdicts are the state agency's decisions as reported to EPA ATTAINS; PlainLakes renders them without modification.
A composite of this record's EPA ATTAINS designated-use verdicts, filed impairment count, and assessment currency, weighted and benchmarked against the national corpus of assessed active waterbodies. This is a water-quality standing, not a human-recreation or property-value judgment, and dimensions with no filed verdict drop out rather than count against the score.
Where Paonia Reservoir. stands in the filed register
Paragraphs are selected by this unit's percentiles and use matrix: different lakes lead with different dimensions. Figures are ATTAINS / portal register arithmetic, not advice.
The signature stat: cause-list length
The standout filed fact is a short cause list: 0 causes, shorter than 51% of assessed lake-type units. A short list can mean a focused impairment, or a shallow assessment.
Large assessed unit
At 317.6 acres, Paonia Reservoir. clears the upper tercile of assessed lake-type units with an area on file (5,136 still larger). Size comparisons use the portal's deduplicated lake ranking population, not raw ATTAINS row counts.
All ruled-on uses pass
The filed use determinations for recreation, aquatic life are all Fully Supporting. Where an overall IR category still flags the unit, look at the cause list and report standing rather than treating the use row as empty.
IR category in the supporting band
EPA's Integrated Report category for Paonia Reservoir. is 1. In ATTAINS that band means the assessed uses are supporting (or supporting with other waters in the unit), so the narrative weight shifts to how deep the assessment went and whether monitoring is current, not to a restoration plan.
Overall status: fully supporting
Overall status is Fully Supporting. If an IR category or cause row still appears, it usually reflects a prior listing path or a use the overall rollup does not collapse, read those sections rather than stopping at the tile.
According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ATTAINS program, Colorado carries 344 filed lake-type waterbodies in the August 2026 extract, and this page renders the assessment record EPA assigned to Paonia Reservoir. without modification. See our methodology for reporting-unit limits and gauge linking rules.
The record
Designated-use assessments
Fully Supporting and Not Supporting are the state's definitive verdicts; other entries mean the use was not conclusively assessed in this cycle. Colorado filed 2019 as the year this waterbody was last monitored.
| Designated use | Group | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Agriculture | Other | Fully Supporting |
| Aquatic Life Cold Water-Class 1 | Aquatic-life or related | Fully Supporting |
| Recreation | Recreation | Fully Supporting |
| Water Supply | Drinking-water supply designation | Fully Supporting |
The record
Listed impairment causes
The state's reported assessment lists no impairment causes for this reservoir.
Reading the record
Paonia Reservoir.: Category 1 reading
1 Category 1: all designated uses supported
Colorado filed this assessment unit as Category 1: every designated use assessed here was reported as supported. That is the filer's Integrated Report classification, not a PlainLakes score.
Scale and rank
Paonia Reservoir. is one of 344 lake-type waterbodies reported to EPA from Colorado, and one of 122 whose reported record carries enough populated assessment or gauge data for this site to list and index it. At 318 assessed acres it ranks 5,137th by assessed size among the 38,628 lakes the dataset carries an area for, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once, behind 5,136 lakes with a larger one.
Water level
A USGS gauge tracks this reservoir's water surface elevation daily, and the latest reading is 36.88 ft below the reading 30 days earlier, against a 365-day observed range of 77.9 ft. The state has not yet filed a definitive fish-consumption verdict for this record; that field populates when it reports it in a future Integrated Report cycle.
Water level: 365-day record
Daily water surface elevation values, feet above the National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929 (NGVD 29), from USGS gauge 09131495 (Paonia Reservoir Near Bardine, Co), shown weekly. Readings are daily-batch snapshots, not real-time conditions.
- Latest reading
- 6,375.9 ft 36.88000000000011ft vs 30 days earlier
- 2026-08-15 · Provisional, subject to USGS revision
Water level: 365-day record
Subscribe to water level updates for Paonia Reservoir. (RSS)
109 of the 213 daily values in this window (51%) are provisional and subject to USGS revision; USGS has approved this gauge's record through 2026-01-20.
Full gauge record: USGS monitoring location 09131495
In context
Where Paonia Reservoir. sits nationally
Assessed size among U.S. lakes
Distribution of assessed acreage across ATTAINS lakes filed with an area, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once
318 Top 13% larger than 87% of 38,628 lakes
lakes the dataset carries an area for, counting a state’s repeated filings of one water once, bucketed by value
Source EPA ATTAINS · Reporting cycles 1987–2026
Listed causes vs waterbodies carrying a verdict
How many impairment causes U.S. waterbodies with a reported verdict carry
0 Among the shortest cause lists fewer listed causes than 51% of 23,610 waterbodies carrying a verdict
named waterbodies carrying a verdict, bucketed by value
Source EPA ATTAINS · Reporting cycles 1987–2026
In both charts each bar is a band and taller bars hold more waterbodies; the dashed line and filled bar mark Paonia Reservoir.. Hover or tap any bar for its full count and share.
In context
Colorado context
ATTAINS carries 344 lake-type waterbodies in Colorado, 89 assessed as not supporting at least one use and 74 fully supporting. Among the 122 indexed units there, Paonia Reservoir. ranks 100th by listed-cause count (no listed causes) and 58th by assessed size among the 122 with an area filed; it is one of the 74 fully-supporting indexed records in the state .
| Other large assessed lakes in Colorado | Assessed acres |
|---|---|
| John Martin Reservoir. Not Supporting | 17,147 |
| Blue Mesa Reservoir Fully Supporting | 8,957 |
| Lake Granby. Not Supporting | 7,036 |
| Two Buttes Reservoir, Two Buttes Pond, Hasty Lake, Holbrook Reservoir, Burchfield Lake, Nee-Skah (Queens) Reservoir, Neeso Pah Reservoir, Nee Noshe Reservoir. Fully Supporting | 6,123 |
| Lake and reserviors tributary to the South Platte River Not Assessed | 5,770 |
| Lake Meredith. Not Supporting | 5,531 |
Peers near Paonia Reservoir.'s size or cause load
Similar assessed acres
Nearest filed extents (318 acres here).
- Boardman Lake · 318 acres · MI
- Dupont Lake · 317 acres · FL
- Stanley Lake · 318 acres · MI
- Crook · 317 acres · MN
Similar cause load
Nearest listed-cause counts (0 here). Peers already in the acreage column are omitted.
- 31st Street Harbor · 0 causes · IL
- 42nd Avenue East Beach · 0 causes · MN
- 59th Street Harbor · 0 causes · IL
- 657 Dunleavy (Beach) · 0 causes · MI
What to do with this record
- Assessment verdicts are cycle-based, not real-time. For fish-consumption decisions, your state advisory program is the binding source. Consumption status guide
- Water levels shown are daily snapshots. Seasonal drawdown and datum conventions matter when comparing levels. How to read level data
- Impairment listings follow the Clean Water Act 303(d) process; a listing is a regulatory finding, not a closure notice. 303(d) explained
PlainLakes renders state assessment decisions and federal gauge observations without modification. It does not issue advisories.
Assessment decisions on this page are rendered directly from state Integrated Report records in EPA's ATTAINS system; gauge figures are daily-value observations from the USGS National Water Information System, no number is typed in by an editor. Overall status, use verdicts, and causes are the state's reported decisions for assessment unit COGUNF07_B. Counts and percentiles are computed across all lake-type records PlainLakes ingests from ATTAINS. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error. Data current as of 2026-08-17. Primary sources: EPA ATTAINS and USGS National Water Information System.