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

Steelhead (sea-run rainbow trout) are native to a huge swath of the Pacific coast from Southern California to Canada, including most of the states of Oregon and Washington, and parts of Idaho.  In most of the major watersheds in this range, steelheads are officially classified as "Threatened" species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA).  These areas are shaded orange in the map below.

The most vulnerable habitat in the range is, not surprisingly, Southern California, where the species is listed as "Endangered" (shaded red).  Only on the coast of Washington, Oregon, and far Northern California is the species considered "Of Concern" (yellow), or, in the priceless jargon of environmental regulations, "Not Warranted" (green).

Because steelhead are an endangered species, there's an enormous amount of information available about them.  Check out the subsidiary pages for information about:

• CA and NW distributions
• CA critical habitat
• CA "abundance" information

All of the data we're publishing here has been available in professional GIS formats (shapefiles, geodatabases, relational databases), or available online via interactive, web "mapping" applications, or both.  We've extracted what we think is the most useful information for fishermen and created KMZ files that make it a lot friendlier to use.