A soon-to-be-published study concludes that deer overpopulation is having a devastating, long-term impact on forests. The study will come out next month in the journal Ecological Applications. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz reports:
Transcript
A soon-to-be-published study concludes that deer overpopulation is having a
devastating, long-term impact on forests. The study will come out next month in the
journal Ecological Applications. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz reports:
The U.S. Forest Service study was conducted in Pennsylvania’s
Allegheny National Forest. It examined deer densities
ranging from 10 deer to 64 deer per square mile.
As deer increased, tree species declined.
Red maple, sugar maple, white ash, yellow poplar, and
cucumber trees were all adversely affected, and native yew has been practically eradicated in the forest.
Steve Horsley is the study’s co-author. He says the next step is to determine
whether the impact of deer on forests is as great in areas where there
are also housing developments and
farmland.
“Deer tend, for example, when agriculture is in the mix, to
spend their time eating alfalfa and corn,
which have more digestible energy than most of the
plants that you find in the woods.”
Horsely says in the meantime, deer populations must come down,
preferably to less than 20 per square mile. In the Allegheny National Forest, that would mean cutting the
population in half.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Cindi Deutschman-Ruiz.