We live in an amazing time. There is a mountain of data available to the public to use for purposes of fishing studies. In Pennsylvania, we have around 15,000 miles of wild trout streams. That’s a daunting number, and when you’re hunting for a specific fish, it seems unmanageable. However, using some data and tools that are available for everyone, we can break down these thousands of miles of stream into specifically what we’re looking for.
In this post I’m going to go deep down the rabbit hole of using this data to narrow down what streams to explore. This is about as geeky as you can get in fly fishing I think. Hopefully, some of this is useful to someone out there.
In my quest for big brook trout in PA, I typically used to simply look through the PA Fish & Boat Commission’s online mapping tool found here: http://pfbc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=65a89f6592234019bdc5f095eaf5c6ac
This is a fantastic tool for finding the streams you want to fish. You can filter the streams you want to see by using the layers on the left to view only Class A streams for example. It’s one of the best visual ways to find streams that I know of. Kudos to the state for putting it out there for our use. It is still a bit of an overview, and I wanted to find a more specific way to drill down into the data to find the streams I’m interested in.
Another useful piece of information out there for Pennsylvania is the Class A list. If you’re not familiar, Class A streams are listed as “Streams that support a population of naturally produced trout of sufficient size and abundance to support a long-term and rewarding sport fishery.” You can download a pdf list of the Class A streams here: https://www.fishandboat.com/Fish/PennsylvaniaFishes/Trout/Documents/classa.pdf
This is a great list because it gives a little more information about the streams. It’s still a bit overwhelming though, and I needed a way to narrow things down a bit. So I exported the pdf to excel so I could sort the data. You can download a copy of my spreadsheet here (keep in mind this list is updated by the state, so my excel file will be out of date):
With the list in Excel, now I can sort by the fields to look at things a little more closely. The first thing I did was sort all of the “Brook Trout Only” streams by length. In my opinion, anything under 3 miles in length is typically pretty small water, and usually has a lot of smaller fish. There are exceptions for this, but stream length or section length is a good place to start filtering down the list.
| County | Water | Section | Fishery | Section Limits | Lower Limit Latitude | Lower Limit Longitude | Length (miles) | Percent Public Ownership | |
| Potter-Tioga | Kettle Creek | 2 | Brook | Billings Branch to Long Run | 41.560790 | -77.680600 | 7.96 | 86 |
In the “snapshot” above, you can see what the basic layout of the Class A list is. With this information, we can apply some filters and sorting to narrow down our choices. After sorting by stream length, the next important piece of information is % Public Ownership. For this, I applied a conditional formatting rule to color code the rows based on the % value. This is just a quick visual clue that it’s either accessible or not.
It’s been my experience that streams with less than 85% public ownership are difficult to access. Even some that are above 85% ownership have access issues. In a lot of cases, only the headwater sections of the stream are on public land, and there are no roads remotely close to them. There are even 2 streams in the state with 99% public ownership where there is no road access anywhere along the stream. The only way to access these 2 streams would be by boat from a larger river.
The next conditional formatting rule I applied was for the stream length. I used a gradient bar rule to show the length of the stream. Again, this is just a visual clue to know whether it’s going to be a sizable section/stream. There are situations where the brook trout only portion of the Class A is just a smaller section of a larger stream. Kettle Creek is a good example of this.
The final piece of data I wanted to sort by was distance from my home. Thankfully the Class A list has the Latitude and Longitude location of the start of the Class A stretch in the list in decimal form. I searched and was able to find an excel formula that will calculate the distance using the decimal Lat/Long location.
The formula is:
=ACOS(COS(RADIANS(90-L3)) *COS(RADIANS(90-F15)) +SIN(RADIANS(90-L3)) *SIN(RADIANS(90-F15)) *COS(RADIANS(M3-G15))) *3958.756
In the formula, cell “L3” is the Longitudinal position of my home and “M3” is the Latitudinal location. “F15” is the Longitudinal location of the stream, and “G15” is the Latitudinal location.
I then copy/pasted the Lat/Long coordinates into google maps and looked at satellite imagery to try to determine which locations looked the most promising. Sorting through all of this data narrowed down the options considerable. Some key results of my study;
- Of the 524 Brook Trout Only streams, only 38 of them are longer than 3.24 miles and have more than 85% public ownership.
- 138 of the Brook Trout Only streams have greater than 85% public ownership.
- There are only 42 Brook Trout Only streams that are longer than 4 miles compared to 67 mixed brook/brown streams.
- I ended up with 24 possible streams based on all of my criteria from the original 524.
- A lot of the longer streams are either completely private, mostly private, or have no public access.
To add another layer of complexity, the next thing I looked at is the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture’s dataset which shows the probability of brook trout occurrence along with a bunch of other useful data. I’m not quite silly enough to merge my simple spreadsheet w/ the EBTJV data and build some kind of Google Earth overlay kmz file. What I did do though was use the EBTJV mapping tool to look at my top 24 streams.
You can view their mapping tool here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=f70da52f45304ab8be440885d32d3866
Let’s look at one of the examples. I’ll disclose a stream here which is probably no secret. It’s also not unlike a lot of other streams in the state, so it’s not like it’s some kind of honey hole. Roaring Run in Centre county ticked a lot of the boxes for my criteria. One thing it doesn’t have going for it is the Public Ownership % number, but the 67% of public ownership is in the right place. I should note also that I didn’t exclude any streams from my search based on % of public ownership. I only used it as a factor for decision-making and for determining how accessible it would be.
| Centre | Roaring Run | 1 | Brook | Headwaters to Sink at RM 1.38 | 40.759741 | -77.823922 | 3.92 | 67 | 62.76037438 |
In closing, it’s very common in Pennsylvania to run into “blue lines” that have a higher biomass than Class A listed streams. It’s still entirely possible to blueline in Pennsylvania. In fact, it’s probably a better method of finding a hidden gem than all this data wrangling. Regardless, it’s fun sometimes to make up theories about where you might encounter the best brook trout fishing. It’s a good way to get excited about trying new streams. I’m thankful that all this data and tools are available to the general public.
