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Deer Information:

1,421 deer

8.63 deer / sq. mile
Habitat Condition: Very Poor
The image below is an infrared aerial photograph of the landscape, with the deer survey data superimposed on top of it. It is not the imagery obtained from the survey flights. The deer survey flight footage was interpreted, the deer locations were plotted, and the results were added to the image below, along with state forest and flight area boundaries.
Click the image below for a larger picture

Located in western Clinton County and northeastern Centre County, this area is 140,542 acres (219.6 square miles), and falls within WMU 2G. Of this, 105,345 acres, or 164.6 square miles were surveyed. A 25,895 acre area was included in the DMAP program in 2004 as DMAP Area number 704. While some parts of this area are very remote and inaccessible, others are highly perforated by natural gas development in the form of well sites and access roads. The survey, completed on April 11, 2005, detected 1421 deer at an area-wide minimum density of 8.63 deer per square mile.
The entire area was divided into 3 separate blocks. The minimum deer density of the eastern block was 10.38 deer per square mile, 6.91 for the central block, and 6.74 for the western block.
This area is one of the Game Commission's Doe Mortality study areas, and was the study area for the Hunter Movement Study. Approximately 70 deer will be radio-tracked on the area, and should provide a valuable opportunity to compare seasonal movements of deer to these survey results. This will also be one of the Forest Restoration Research Areas, where deer browsing effects on the forest ecosystem will be intensively monitored and analyzed.
Additional analyses are planned for these data from this large area to test the potential for using FLIR to sample larger areas, instead of the complete census technique used in this survey. The data from this survey will be modeled at various sampling intensities to determine if some lower level of effort can provide useable estimates of deer densities.