A Conversation With the Smokies’ Fish Master

Since joining the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as a fisheries technician in May 1994, Matt Kulp has yet to find a reason to leave. These days he oversees all fisheries work in the park as its supervisory fish biologist, a job he’s held since 2014. Kulp took a break from the field for a conversation about trout, water quality and the importance of habitat restoration. 

Smoky Mountain Living: You’ve been the supervisory fish biologist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since 2014. What does that mean on a day-to-day basis? 

Matt Kulp: It’s basically being a steward of the aquatic resources at the park, especially watching over and keeping tabs on the water quality throughout the 2,900 miles or so of stream, and also keeping a pulse on the fish community and fish population health throughout the park. There’s a lot of ways you can do all of that. We monitor water, and we use Trout Unlimited and other park volunteers to monitor those seven watersheds we look at throughout the park. We also do a lot of work to monitor fish populations in mid-to-high elevations, and we do a considerable amount of restoration work for native fish. There’s all the spinoff projects too that we tend to do—graduate work, scientific studies. There’s a lot of educational components that we work on. Anytime there’s a road or a bridge or something that’s construction-related we make sure that the permitting is done and that it’s done in a way that doesn’t impact those aquatic resources. 

What is it about this field in general—and the Smokies in particular—that holds your interest?

As fisheries biologists in the Smokies we have a tremendous amount of diversity—67 species of fish. There’s a lot of diversity there, and there’s a lot of opportunity too for some restoration work on all those. I always say you can’t beat our 522,000-acre office. It’s a pretty cool place to work. 

What are some of the main issues facing fish in the Smokies? 

There’s two pieces of that. One is the habitat side. Even though we have plenty of data to demonstrate that our streams are being impaired due to acid deposition, because it’s an air source there’s not a direct way to go after it. We recently made some pretty good progress in establishing a goal for the park—a deposition reduction goal of 60 percent by the year 2080. The other side is the fish population side. The big threats are non-natives. We already have rainbow and brown trout in the park, but we get a lot of non-natives that come in from outside the park too. There’s stocking going on in all the rivers that lead out of the park all the way out around the Smokies. Things like non-native gill lice and whirling disease have been found in Western North Carolina in the last year or two, and those could easily make their way upstream to the park.

Brook trout restoration has been a major focus. Why is this an important issue for the park to address?

It’s part of our policy to restore native species wherever possible, and it’s part of our heritage as well. When you think about the Smokies you have things that pop into your head, like trees and mountains and streams, maybe old cabins, but part of that as well is Southern Appalachian brook trout. It’s part of the fabric of what makes the Smokies special. Across their range we’re trying to get a metapopulation—a group of interconnected streams—so they can move and share genetic material around. It makes for a healthier population than a single segment of stream. We’ve restored just over 30.2 miles of 13 streams. Our list has 21 streams that could potentially be restored. That totals about 45.7 miles, so about 66 percent of that has been done.