Privately funded water quality monitoring provides science to inform trout recovery
Following recent coverage in the Montana Standard on Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP) and Montana State University’s (MSU) trout and river studies, Save Wild Trout is also wrapping up its 2025 field season and water quality monitoring program that is collecting key river data otherwise not collected including dissolved oxygen, nutrient levels, pH on an ongoing basis along with a basin wide macroinvertebrate survey.
“We can’t effectively manage resources without robust datasets that reflect current conditions”, said Brian Wheeler, Program Director of Save Wild Trout. “This year we collected another season of baseline data necessary to fill in the gaps and help guide wild trout recovery efforts by characterizing the health of the water they live in.”
This summer, Save Wild Trout observed many of the same troubling conditions that were present in 2023 and 2024 and detailed in the Jefferson River Basin Abiotic Monitoring 2023-2024: widespread algal blooms (emerging even earlier this year, in June), harmful water temperatures, and low dissolved oxygen concentrations that are injurious to wild trout and other aquatic life.
SWT’s science is filling in missing pieces essential to understanding the declines in wild trout populations across the Big Hole, Beaverhead, Ruby, and Jefferson Rivers. The monitoring data collected will help provide a more comprehensive picture of conditions in Southwest Montana’s rivers, and drive improved management to better protect river health, and the hundreds of jobs, local businesses, and the $1.3 billion cold-water economy that depend upon healthy fisheries.