Published: August 09, 2009 12:41 am      

Agency looks to reel in data on Pa. brook trout

Almost every serious trout fisherman knows of a tiny tributary or two where self-sustaining populations of wild brook trout live. Such places are rare and those who discover them usually guard the information carefully.

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission has recently dug deeply into data compiled with modern mapping techniques to help uncover a trove of such treasured brook-trout populations in southern Somerset County.

The effort began in 2005 as part of Pennsylvania’s Brook Trout Conservation Strategies, which recognizes the importance of the state’s wild brook trout populations, acknowledges the threats they face, and proposes to offer a measure of protection to their habitats in the short term, and improve brook trout habitat across the state in the long term.

But to protect and improve a resource, you first have to find and evaluate it.

Pennsylvania’s fish commission partners with the Eastern Brook Trout Venture, an effort that includes a wide range of governmental, sportsmen’s and wildlife organizations concerned about the decline in wild brook trout populations over much of the eastern United States. In it’s report, Eastern Brook Trout: Status and Threats, it notes that brook trout no longer live in 34 percent of the Pennsylvania watersheds where they were reported historically, and that there is a sizeable number of small tributaries where no one officially knows whether they continue to exist.

“A significant portion (17 percent) of the state lacks any data on the presence of brook trout,” the report says.

So, the state’s fisheries managers have been charged with filling that information gap, and the staff working out of the Somerset regional office started with available data.

“We used our layers on Class A wild trout waters and wild trout waters, anything with natural reproduction, and utilized that as predictors of where we could expect that there may be a wild trout population that we have never assessed,” said Area 8 Fisheries Manager Rick Lorson, who oversaw the operation. “In conjunction with that, population census data was used, and we looked at the over-time change in population in certain watersheds to find out where the highest amount of increased population was occurring. Where those two crossed – the potential for wild trout and the potential for population growth – is where we decided we would concentrate our efforts in sampling.”

Among the top watersheds on the list were Somerset County’s Laurel Hill Creek, Westmoreland County’s Loyalhanna Creek and Fayette County’s Sandy Creek. The designation earlier this year of Laurel Hill Creek as one of the country’s most threatened waterways by American Rivers helped bump it to the top of the list, and the Area 8 staff decided to do this year’s field work on the Laurel Hill and Sandy creeks watersheds.

“It makes sense when you get out there in the field to realize that Allen Creek and Fall Creek and Blue Hole Creek and the others very close to them – that the water coming off the ridge would have a good chance of having wild trout,” Lorson said. “We sampled nine streams in the Laurel Hill watershed. Six of the nine did have wild trout populations, so we ended up being able to recommend that the commissioners add 20 miles of wild trout water to the list.”

The ability to list those six streams as wild trout water is a fairly simple clerical matter for the fish commissioners, but it carries big implications.

The designation means any effort to utilize the water in those streams, or the land around them, for industrial use will be much more difficult.

And, that protection automatically extends to any attached wetlands.

“Essentially, we’re attempting to have information to utilize if a permit decision comes up,” Lorson said. “We can go on our predictions, but unless that information is already there, someone would have to go out there and do that, and you can’t always count on consultants to find the information, or be required to for that matter. It’s really our responsibility.”

Lorson said it was no surprise that brook trout were found in so many Laurel Hill Creek tributaries, and he expects there are a lot more on Laurel Ridge that also support wild trout.

“We have a lot of waters that we wish we could have gotten to,” he said. “Hopefully, an offshoot of this will be a statewide program to get some addition people, if we can get the funding, to go around and get these documented.”

The findings in the Sandy Creek drainage show why it is important to verify the presence of wild brook trout now. Of the seven Fayette County tributaries checked, just two retain their brook trout.

Even on Laurel Ridge, some trout are near the edge.

“One stream had a pH of 5.5 and an alkalinity of 3,” Lorson said. “It’s not far from losing its population.”