KMZs and other files showing the distribution of Yellowstone Cutthroat are available from the download system.

The Yellowstone Cutthroat lives principally in the NW Wyoming Highlands in and around Yellowstone National Park and northward into southwestern Montana.  Parts of its range touch northern Nevada, northern Utah, and southern Idaho.  We provide multiple KMZs from two major data sources (The Yellowstone Cutthroat Interagency Coordination Group, and Trout Unlimited's CSI), as well as some useful PDF documents.  A sub-sub variant, the Snake River Finespot Cutthroat is, for Federal listing purposes, considered a "Yellowstone" cutthroat.  Some of the documentation and data distinguishes them.

The KMZ were created by WildTroutStreams.com from data created by the GIS group at Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks working on behalf of the Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout Interagency Coordination Group.  This pooled data from Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming Fish and Game departments, the USDA Forest Service, and the USDI Fish and Wildlife Service.  They published two "Range-Wide Assessment Reports" in 2006 and 2009, both of which are in the download system.  The 2009 dataset includes a number of GIS shapefiles and a massive Access database and is published on StreamNet.org.  We've created a series of photo overlay KMZs that characterize this data (due to technical limitations of our tools, we weren't able to create a vector data KMZ of this dataset).  However, the overlays are pretty good especially if you use them in combination with the NHD layer, which will give you stream names automatically.

There are two sets of KMLS created from this data.  The first, shown in the image above, shows the full current range in purple.  Yellow segments are those streams with the highest rated habitat (rated "1").  The second set shows ownership information.  Privately owned streams are shown in red, wilderness areas in orange.  The rest of the range, in purple, designates non-wllderness, publicly owned lands which could be managed by any of several state or Federal agencies.

The photo below shows a detail of a Google Earth screen image at a low level, with both the photo overlay and NHD layer turned on.  Note that there are many more streams in the NHD dataset than in the assessment GIS data.  It's also quite clear, even at this resolution, which streams are included and which aren't.

The second datasource is Trout Unlimited's Conservation Success Index.  This is basin data, which scores an estimate of habitat quality based on the group's quantitative model. Habitat is coded (from best to worst): blue, green, yellow, orange, red, brown (extirpated basins).  No doubt the group used much of the same data from the previous assessment to create its model.  The results are quite consistent, but there are many places where they differ as well.  You can view both simultaneously for if you arrange the layers right (scroll down for a detail).

Source (above and below):  Google Earth image using data provided by Trout Unlimited's Conservation Success Index