There are no secrets any more...

About 5 years ago I went on my first quest to discover wild trout streams, primarily using Internet resources.

The effort consisted of finding the list of WTS streams on the NJ DEC website, and trying to locate them on a map. The end product consisted of printing a topo map and sticking it in a folder. I located about 6 streams, visited all of them, and decided I liked two.

Not too bad. But a shadow of what's possible now.

Now I must have about 600 streams located precisely in a Google Earth DB. Mostly in NJ (all 175 of the TP streams listed by the state), MA (about 200 streams) and the balance in neighboring states.

In addition, I've mapped several thousand additional streams using GIS resources.

And I keep finding more stuff.

NY was a toughie. Now I think I've "cracked the code". Turns out there's an ongoing project to take the kind of GIS data that was made available for the Southern Appalachia (data I've downloaded and mapped extensively), and do it for the entire eastern US, with a special focus on Brook Trout habitat.

There are no secrets anymore.

But if you thought the way to regulate these streams was to keep them a secret, it must be a very unsettling thing.

My views on this are pretty clear: see Why this Blog?