Estimating White-Tailed Deer Abundance Using Non-Invasive DNA Collection and Spatially Explicit Capture Recapture Models

A fundamental requirement for managing hunted big game populations is to estimate the population size either before or after the harvest period. Densities expressed for representative habitat types or indices that are validated for population size are often used as surrogates for point estimates of populations. Lacking those metrics, harvest coupled with harvest effort is often used to track trends in big game populations.

We attempted to estimate white-tailed deer abundance by collecting scat and identifying individual animals using DNA from those samples and then employed spatially explicit capture-recapture (SECR) models to estimate deer population size and density for the study site.