NY and PA agencies develop plan to manage trout in Delaware River tailwaters

Officials from Pennsylvania and New York recently convened with anglers and other interested community stakeholders to discuss the protection and enhancement of the trout fishery in the cool tailwaters of the Pepacton and Cannonsville Reservoirs.

Central to the discussion was their plan to guide the future maintenance of the region’s robust brown and rainbow trout populations, which was published earlier this year by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission.

“Our goal is to monitor, sustain and promote a premier sport fishery for both wild brown trout and wild rainbow trout, detect change and respond in an adaptive fashion,” said Chris VanMaaren, regional fisheries manager for the DEC.

Beginning at the Cannonsville and Pepacton Reservoirs, the tailwaters include about 75 miles of river, all the way downstream to Callicoon, N.Y.

The New York and Pennsylvania-based agencies initially partnered in 2018 for a three-year study, the Joint Fisheries Investigation Plan, to gather baseline information about trout in the fishery. 

This study found that the brown and rainbow trout populations in the tailwaters are stable and sustainable, and informed the recently unveiled joint management plan designed to keep them that way. The three main tenets of the plan are monitoring, habitat enhancement and outreach.

Monitoring

The fishery’s biologists will gather data on the trout population’s stability using methods like electrofishing and PIT tagging. Electrofishing is a technique that uses an electric field to temporarily stun fish so they can be caught, measured, catalogued and released. PIT tags are transponders implanted in individual fish to keep track of them over a course of years.

“The value of our PIT tagging data is extensive,” VanMaaren said. “Whenever we get recaptures, we can track that fish’s growth, we can track its movement, its condition, and that allows us to see the influence of various environmental variables over time.”

Creel surveys gather information from anglers, such as the number of fish caught, their size, where they were caught, the times the angler began and ended their day, and the techniques used (e.g. fly fishing, bait fishing). They also ask about fishers’ overall satisfaction with their experience. The survey will be available for fishery visitors to fill out via QR codes at the various access points to the river. 

Habitat enhancement

The agencies’ joint trout management plan lays out several possibilities for in-stream habitat enhancements, though at the moment none of the proposed enhancement projects are underway.

Some of the options considered in the plan include creating microhabitat using wood and boulder placement, locating thermal refuges for protection and enhancement in the East Branch, which receives less coldwater release from the reservoirs than the West Branch, and determining whether sediment deposits are cutting off spawning habitat in tributaries.

“We’re going to look at fluvial fans, fluvial fans being the sediment deposits at the mouths of tributaries, to see whether or not they are acting as impediments to passage, because the tributaries can be part of the success of the overall system,” VanMaaren said. “Access to the tributaries can provide additional resilience for the population.”

There are several active projects led by local organizations restoring trout habitat in the Upper Delaware. Earlier this year, both Friends of the Upper Delaware and Trout Unlimited received federal grants for projects that will cumulatively restore trout access to 14 miles of stream.

Outreach

Attendee comments were limited as only the hosts spoke. During a Q&A, one of the hosts read questions submitted by the audience aloud. One question from Trout Unlimited was, “Is there anything we at the local Trout Unlimited chapters can do to support this effort?” VanMaaren said they could help by encouraging participation in the creel survey.

The outreach goals of the new plan include promoting creel surveys to anglers and regularly publishing creel survey data, holding periodic meetings for stakeholders to share information, and publishing an annual report card on the status of the fishery.

“The report card for the joint management plan is how we’re going to index plan activities as we move forward,” said Daryl Pierce, a fisheries manager for the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. “And we anticipate that the agencies will meet every year, discuss the performance of the population, discuss what we know about findings for the fishery, and then make decisions as to whether or not corrective management needs to be implemented.”

The report card will compare the trout population to previous years where data was available, and use a “stoplight approach” to categorize indices like the relative abundance of spawning stock, large trout and trophy-sized trout.

The report card will depict information in graphics, with indices in the green representing a sustainable population, indices in the yellow representing a sustainable population that warrants increased scrutiny and indices in the red representing a population that will not be sustainable after three years in the red.

Steve Hurst, NYSDEC’s chief of the bureau of fisheries, said the first of the fishery report cards will be published in early 2026.