2025-2035 Brook Trout Outcome Management Strategy

Description

This management strategy outlines approaches for achieving the 2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement's Brook Trout Outcome: Restore and sustain naturally reproducing brook trout populations in Chesapeake Bay headwater streams, with an eight percent increase in occupied habitat by 2025. Priority brook trout conservation strategies include:

• Protect highly functional wild brook trout patches from detrimental changes in land and water use practices through land conservation.
• Connect habitats that have a high likelihood of sustaining stable wild brook trout populations.
• Restore brook trout habitats that have been impacted by poor land and water use practices (e.g., livestock access to streams, polluted runoff, acid mine drainage).
• Enhance or restore natural hydrologic regimes (e.g., road decommissioning, increasing forest cover, improving soil health).
• Prevent and mitigate the spread of nonnative species into allopatric brook trout patches.
• Reintroduce wild brook trout into extirpated catchments or where an increase in genetic fitness of the population is needed and supported by science.