New deer research debunks falsehoods spread around deer abundance.

03/11/2023.

Today, the Arthur-Rylah Institute for Environmental Research released a report detailing the statewide abundance of wild deer in Victoria.

This is essential data produced by the Victorian government that helps to improve the knowledge gaps surrounding wild deer and their abundance in Victoria.

Wild deer management often must deal with the challenge of out-of-touch lobby groups that fearmonger and attack recreational hunters from the suburbs and regions instead of being pragmatic and evidence-based.

Combined with the annual harvest estimate data available due to game licensing, approximately 60% of wild deer shot is done on public land. This would indicate that around 37% of the public land wild deer population is annually harvested by recreational hunters.

This significantly impacts total abundance and severely restricts the growth of a wild population of deer. This further demonstrates the critical role that recreational deer hunting provides in the matrix of wild deer management. All whilst injecting close to $250 million dollars into the Victorian economy and supporting thousands of full-time jobs every year.

This government research debunks such rhetoric and will play an important role in helping ensure the wild deer management narrative remains fact-based and not subject to erroneous lobby group claims of “millions of deer”.

To help address knowledge gaps relating to deer distribution, abundance, and impacts within Victoria, the statewide monitoring program was developed and run between 2021-2023.

The project aimed to:

• design and implement a statewide monitoring program estimating the abundance of deer in Victoria and report the results at statewide and regional scales.
• Undertake vegetation assessments at each monitored site.
• Produce spatial raster layers of deer densities for each of the four deer species.
• Provide guidance on how the monitoring data could be developed to provide ecological indicators of trends in deer abundance and ecological integrity.

The project was carried out on public land in Victoria across 253 sites between September 2021 and May 2023. To target hog deer, an additional 64 sites were selected in South Gippsland and Wilsons Promontory.

The results of the survey were that across the 317 camera traps, 148 of them detected deer, and a form of deer sign was recorded at 186 of the 317. This enabled the following total deer abundances to be calculated on public land:

• Total: 191,153
  • Sambar 123,061
  • Fallow   48,932
  • Red        12,672
  • Hog        4,243

A result from the modelling demonstrated that deer tended to have higher densities closer to pastural land, particularly for fallow and red deer.

This study provides the first estimates of statewide and regional abundance for wild deer in Victoria. It provides valuable information to enable a maturing conversation of wild deer and their management to be grounded in facts and data, not rhetoric and fearmongering by out-of-touch lobby groups.

It should also be noted that this study was undertaken on public land, and there will still be deer unaccounted for on private land. However, the number of deer on private land would not be expected to change the estimated abundance of 191,153 by a significant amount.

The study can be found here.