Deer and The Nature Conservancy: What organizations can do to limit impacts of deer on our forests

Background/Question/Methods

While the benefits of forests -- watershed protection, air purification, recreation, and climate regulation – are plentiful, these ecosystem services are not guaranteed forever, particularly when so many of our forests lack adequate regeneration.  A primary factor limiting forest regeneration is deer browse.  Study after study points to the impact of deer not only on forest regeneration but also on decreases in bird diversity, expansion of invasive plants and increases in the spread of Lyme disease.  Despite these scientific findings, state agencies still largely set deer management objectives based upon hunter satisfaction relying little on the ecological data available to them.  In an effort to change this, The Nature Conservancy of New York recently completed a forest regeneration study (see http://www.nature.org/nyforests) using data from the USDA Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program and methods from an ongoing U.S. Forest Service regeneration study in Pennsylvania. Seedling and sapling densities at 1,647 unique forested locations were rated on a scale, ranging from poor to very good.  Regeneration status was assessed for two species groups --all native canopy trees and for a subset of commercially valuable timber species.

Results/Conclusions

We found that regeneration was poor in a 1/3 of the plots for canopy species and not sufficient in 57% of plots for economically important timber species. Canopy regeneration was poorest in the southeast portion of the state including Long Island, the southern Hudson Valley, and southern Catskills.  Even in areas where regeneration was adequate, it was often dominated by low-value timber species such as American beech and balsam fir. These results suggest that limited regeneration is a problem for forests in many areas and is of particular economic concern for timber species in over half of the state.  We will summarize the results of this study as well as the broader impacts of deer across the eastern U.S.  The goal of this talk is to increase awareness on deer impacts and discuss how we may expand the number of ecological studies which are directly influencing deer management decisions at the state agency level.