By Mara Cassidy
Article link: http://blog.nature.org/science/2013/08/22/too-many-deer/
For our semester-long project, my group and I discussed looking at the overpopulation of deer in Pennsylvania and trying to see their effects on the environment (or if there are even any effects). The article I read to get some information on this issue was entitled “Too Many Deer: A Bigger Threat to Eastern Forests than Climate Change?” (2013).
The article outlined many of the problems that deer are causing for the environments that they live in. Our project would focus on Pennsylvania but damage is shown throughout the country by white tailed deer. There are both direct and indirect effects of their presence in these environments. Numbers show that over the last few decades there has been considerable deer overpopulation and now humans are at a loss for how to manage the population and prevent further damage to these environments.
This issue must be regulated at a state level. In looking at what Pennsylvania is doing, we could also research how other states are responding to the damage being done. Some people are hesitant, however, to start controlling or manipulating the deer population because they think since this is happening in nature, it must be “natural.” Many argue over the morality of killing deer to manage the population. It might be natural, but nonetheless deer are harming the environments that they live in–arguably according to some of the experts in the article more than climate change, forest fires, or lack of conservation. If this is the case, this issue must be addressed.
While deer populations did reach high levels around the year 2000 in the U.S., the total deer population has been on the decline since then. All but a few states are actively trying to keep their deer population stable or to increase. Deer populations in the west have been in decline for many decades. The Pennsylvania Game Commission has recently undertaken a study to examin the relationship between deer and forest regeneration because much of the concern about deer impacts was not based on hard science. Deer populations have been managed to high levels in some areas, but much of that is in the past. A new concern is the decline of deer populations, see: http://www.deerfriendly.com/decline-of-deer-populations