Trout Unlimited

Trout Unlimited (TU) works to conserve, protect, and restore North America’s cold-water fisheries and their watersheds. Across the American West, TU and its partners are working to restore rivers by removing derelict dams and other barriers to fish passage. The organization also advocates for greater policy protections for public lands and rivers. (Substrategy: Advance Conservation Protections.)

This renewal grant would support Trout Unlimited’s efforts to protect, reconnect, and restore western rivers and streams and the lands necessary to sustain them. It will employ science, outreach, and organizing to engage a wide array of stakeholders—including ranchers, business people, and state and federal decision makers—in protecting western river ecosystems and the habitat needed to support them. The organization’s goals for this grant period include improving 1,900 river miles in sixteen western river basins for native and sport fisheries and protecting 32 million acres of public lands in eight western states.

This renewal grant to Trout Unlimited supports its advocacy, science, outreach, and organizing efforts to protect western river ecosystems and the habitat necessary to support them. It supports the goal of the organization’s new CEO, Chris Wood, to unite its separate land and water protection programs in order to be more focused and effective. Specifically, Trout Unlimited would work to protect and restore 800 miles of rivers in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming; protect 20 million acres of roadless land and other important habitat West-wide; and secure a decision from the Environmental Protection Agency protecting Alaska’s Bristol Bay and its salmon fisheries from a proposed mine at its headwaters.