BirdTrout

Root River Watershed, Minnesota

3,150 miles of mapped stream across 1,664 square miles of drainage in Fillmore, Houston, Mower, Winona, Olmsted counties, in 67 named streams. Minnesota designates 384 of those miles as trout water, on 55 streams.

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Public land — where the bank is open to walk and fish

USGS gauge — live water temperature

Water temperature — the colour of every stream in the basin

58 64 70

50°F and colder is cold, through cold-transitional and cool, to warm above 70°F — the same four bands the app paints. On this map the colour is nothing at all: Minnesota DNR publishes no thermal classification, so every stream on this map draws grey. The gauge dots are the one exception and they read live. Grey is every stream here, for the reason above.

The watershed in numbers

HUC8 07040008 in the USGS Watershed Boundary Dataset. Every figure below adds up the river pages in this basin — same records, one basin at a time.

Cold, cool and warm water

Minnesota publishes neither a thermal class nor a fishery tier. What it publishes is a listing under Minnesota Rules Chapter 6264 — a land-use protection covering timber harvest and watershed permits — which says the state protects this water, not how cold it runs. It covers 0% of this basin's stream miles (0.0 of 3,150); the rest is untyped and is drawn grey on the map above.

Minnesota publishes no thermal classification of any stream in the state, so this page has no cold/cool/warm breakdown and none can be inferred: Chapter 6264 is a land-use statute and reading a temperature out of it would be this site inventing one. The live map colours Minnesota water from an air-temperature model at the moment you open it; the Chapter 6264 listings below are MN DNR's own and are the harder fact.

Every named stream in the basin

All 67 of them, longest first. 41 have a page of their own and are linked; the rest are in the app. The class column is Minnesota DNR's designation of that stream. It is not a temperature: this state publishes none, so every row reads untyped in the thermal column. "Now" is the live USGS reading where a gauge stands in that stream.

Public land in the watershed

0 acres in 14 units. Private inholdings carried in the same source file are excluded, here and on the map.

The biggest named blocks of it, each with its own page — the streams on that ground, what is open to hunt on it, and where the access sites are.

• Brightsdale Forest Recreation Area 636 ac
• Choice WMA 1,666 ac
• Dr. Johan C. Hvoslef WMA 296 ac
• Money Creek and Vinegar Ridge Forest Recreation Area 1,091 ac
• Mound Prairie WMA 437 ac
• Root River WMA 947 ac
• Schueler WMA 896 ac
• Seven Springs WMA 340 ac
• R.J.D. Memorial Hardwood State Forest 48,872 ac
• Beaver Creek Valley State Park 744 ac
• Forestville Mystery Cave State Park 3,370 ac
• Rush Creek State Aquatic Management Area (Winona) 319 ac

Best time to fish

The hatch calendar for southeast Minnesota, which is the region this basin's centre falls in — the same regions the app's hatch panel uses. It is a regional record, not a survey of this watershed: nobody has counted insects basin by basin. Year-round records (midges, scuds, sculpins) are left out; they are true every month and they are not what a calendar is for.

24 insects are recorded from southeast Minnesota. Each links to its own page, with the flies that imitate it.

Neighbouring watersheds

The subbasins that share a boundary with this one and carry coldwater streams.

• Buffalo-Whitewater 07040003
• Zumbro 07040004