Linking white-tailed deer harvests to population and environmental processes through ecological modeling

Effective management of white-tailed deer requires scientific information on current population abundance and factors which will produce changes in abundance in the future. Harvest data efficiently provide some information for broad spatial areas. This research is an attempt to provide information on both harvest and non-harvest impacts through the use of ecological models. I integrate deer winter bio-energetic and weight models with deer range quality that predicts substantial mortality in areas with poor range quality, high winter snow depths, and low winter temperatures. I perform an analysis of deer-vehicle collisions that predicts substantial automobile mortality for suburban areas and areas containing major highways. I produce ecological models that predict changes in the deer population during the past and into the future for New York State. It appears that winter severity was responsible for most of the variation in annual buck harvest change from 1988 to 2005 throughout NYS. These models suggest that deer managers need greater certainty about hunter effort, population abundance, and non-harvest mortality to achieve precision levels of less than +/-10% around management objectives.