The Tag Line for the National Trout Center is “ALL THINGS TROUT”, a phrase intended to indicate that the subject matter encompassed by the NTC includes anything at all to do with trout. Our publications, presentations, citizen science activities, newsbulletins, World Wide Web presence, and, indeed, our contact lists, while often representing information relating to our physical location in the Driftless Area of the upper midwest, are not geographically limited in scope. Our teaching, workshops, and clinics on-site in the Root River Valley of Minnesota all have a connection to trout or to the environments haunted by trout.
But the word “trout” is itself an enigma as it has been applied to a wide variety of different fishes, some of which are far removed from the evolutionary line of cold-water fishes known to taxonomists as the Family Salmonidae. To avoid uncertainty about the identity of the fishes we discuss at the National Trout Center, we use the nomenclature of ichthyology, the branch of zoology dealing with fishes. In these terms, the scope of the species of fish that we include in All Things Trout is the Family Salmonidae of the ray-finned bony fishes. The Salmonidae, trout, salmon, whitefish, grayling, and inconnu, are all valued by humans as food or for recreational use and occupy cold, fresh, brackish, or marine waters.
The National Trout Center, supported by a grant from the Southeast Regional Sustainable Development Partnership is examining software, “All Things Trout“, to incorporate a “wiki” about trout into this website.
See our author’s guidelines if you wish to contribute to this growing area of the NTC website.