FARMINGTON – Maine guides, sporting camp owners and state biologists will meet with University of Maine Cooperative Extension officials at 5:30 p.m. Thursday to talk about trout.

The meeting will be held in the Walden Room at Franklin Memorial Hospital on Routes 2 and 4 in Farmington.

It will focus on how the extension service, through market research, can help support Maine’s drive to attract anglers to its wild brook-trout fishery.

Discussion will be solicited from guides and sporting camp owners to help identify the market, attitudes and marketing targets.

Last month, extension official Marc Edwards brought together area fishing guides, sporting camp owners and state biologists Forrest Bonney and John Boland to collect input.

According to minutes from that Jan. 8 meeting, much of the discussion keyed on how to effectively market Maine’s wild brook trout and manage them as a world-class fishery.

Maine’s wild brook-trout fishing opportunities were discovered by others through the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture, the nation’s first pilot project under the National Fish Habitat Initiative.

The federally funded program was launched in 2005 to address regional threats to brook trout from Maine to Georgia by building private and public partnerships to improve fish habitat and conserve wild brook trout.

Maine is the only state with extensive, intact populations of wild brookies in lakes and ponds, including some lakes larger than 5,000 acres. Its brook-trout fishery is valued annually at $114 million.

The University of Maine Cooperative Extension can help by surveying state fishing guides and sporting camp owners to learn market trends, perceptions of brook fisheries and the need for law changes to support the wild brook-trout fishery as a tourist attraction.

The extension also could survey in-state and out-of-state anglers to learn perceptions about the state’s brook fisheries.