Improving Deer Management Through Behavioral Science
Managing white-tailed deer populations is a major challenge for wildlife agencies across the Midwest, with implications for crop damage, vehicle collisions, and the spread of diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD). This six-year, multistate field experiment tests evidence-based behavioral strategies to increase hunter and landowner participation in deer management. The project will provide agencies with practical tools to help manage healthy deer populations and reduce disease spread.
What is the issue?
Managing white-tailed deer densities across much of the Midwestern U.S. is a critical challenge for wildlife agencies. Deer play essential societal and ecological roles, creating both beneficial and negative effects on human livelihoods and safety, recreational opportunities, and agricultural production, while also affecting wildlife habitats and the dynamics of zoonotic and transmissible diseases, including tick-borne illnesses and SARS-CoV-2. Deer densities also affect the growth and spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal neurological disease affecting deer, elk, and moose in North America. The primary lever state and Tribal wildlife agencies can pull to manage healthy deer densities is hunter harvest. In practice, however, efforts to influence hunters' harvest choices can be constrained by social resistance and low participation, and agencies lack rigorous, evidence-based tools for encouraging hunters and landowners to understand management goals and voluntarily participate in agency efforts.
What is at stake?
Without evidence-based guidance on effective methods to influence harvest, agencies are left to implement deer and disease management policies in isolation from one another, while facing the risk of political backlash if interventions are perceived as insufficiently justified. Continuing without better tools threatens public trust and support for agencies' missions and their long-term ability to manage healthy cervid populations while controlling the spread of infectious diseases such as CWD.
What is our approach?
This project was initiated through the CWD Research Consortium to meet its research Objective 4: evaluating deer management efforts across state boundaries. It is a six-year, multistate field experiment currently spanning three Midwestern states (Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio) to test whether behavioral interventions, grounded in the latest social science research on behavior change, can influence landowner cooperation and participation in agency deer management efforts and effectively manage local deer densities. The effort is led by scientists from the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit (MTCWRU), USDA APHIS-WS, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, in collaboration with the NWHC, Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Fort Collins Science Center, state wildlife agencies (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin), universities (University of Montana, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, and Purdue University), and national and regional associations of fish and wildlife agencies.
The project will engage landowners, hunters, and agency experts to generate and prioritize interventions, initially drawing on six behavior change strategies: correcting social norm misperceptions, emphasizing relevance, engaging future thinking, temptation bundling, offering incentives, and removing behavioral constraints. Multiple interventions will be tested using a rigorous experimental design at both the landowner and township level, with outcomes measured through surveys, harvest data, deer density monitoring, and CWD surveillance. A multi-part statistical strategy will help identify which interventions are associated with changes in harvest and deer densities.
What are the benefits?
The project will give state agencies an expert-generated, experimentally validated causal model of hunter and landowner behavior related to cervid harvest; a toolkit of vetted interventions scalable to other contexts; and a tool to predict the relative harvest and density outcomes of different interventions before deploying them. It will also produce standardized data collection protocols across states, a centralized data repository, and at least one peer-reviewed publication describing the project's methodology and outcomes—enabling agencies to move from a business-as-usual approach to evidence-based deer and disease management grounded in real behavioral data.
What have we accomplished?
This project is the outcome of a structured decision making (SDM) process led by MTCWRU in conjunction with the CWD Research Consortium's Objective 4 working group, which brought together state agencies, federal and academic researchers, and partners to design a coordinated multistate study to enhance and evaluate deer management approaches through stakeholder engagement. It also leverages ongoing CWD systems model research, which informs project goal setting and provides key information on the feasibility of management interventions.
What are the next steps?
The project is in a pilot stage, designing interstate deer survey methods and conducting qualitative research with experts, stakeholders, and landowners to understand and characterize the local contexts in which the experimental interventions will be deployed. Subsequent stages will include expert elicitation to prioritize interventions, pre-treatment surveys and deer density assessments, and finalizing the experimental design. Intervention delivery and monitoring will follow, along with analysis and delivery of products to communicate results to partners and the broader management community.
Managing white-tailed deer populations is a major challenge for wildlife agencies across the Midwest, with implications for crop damage, vehicle collisions, and the spread of diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD). This six-year, multistate field experiment tests evidence-based behavioral strategies to increase hunter and landowner participation in deer management. The project will provide agencies with practical tools to help manage healthy deer populations and reduce disease spread.
What is the issue?
Managing white-tailed deer densities across much of the Midwestern U.S. is a critical challenge for wildlife agencies. Deer play essential societal and ecological roles, creating both beneficial and negative effects on human livelihoods and safety, recreational opportunities, and agricultural production, while also affecting wildlife habitats and the dynamics of zoonotic and transmissible diseases, including tick-borne illnesses and SARS-CoV-2. Deer densities also affect the growth and spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD), a fatal neurological disease affecting deer, elk, and moose in North America. The primary lever state and Tribal wildlife agencies can pull to manage healthy deer densities is hunter harvest. In practice, however, efforts to influence hunters' harvest choices can be constrained by social resistance and low participation, and agencies lack rigorous, evidence-based tools for encouraging hunters and landowners to understand management goals and voluntarily participate in agency efforts.
What is at stake?
Without evidence-based guidance on effective methods to influence harvest, agencies are left to implement deer and disease management policies in isolation from one another, while facing the risk of political backlash if interventions are perceived as insufficiently justified. Continuing without better tools threatens public trust and support for agencies' missions and their long-term ability to manage healthy cervid populations while controlling the spread of infectious diseases such as CWD.
What is our approach?
This project was initiated through the CWD Research Consortium to meet its research Objective 4: evaluating deer management efforts across state boundaries. It is a six-year, multistate field experiment currently spanning three Midwestern states (Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio) to test whether behavioral interventions, grounded in the latest social science research on behavior change, can influence landowner cooperation and participation in agency deer management efforts and effectively manage local deer densities. The effort is led by scientists from the Montana Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit (MTCWRU), USDA APHIS-WS, and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, in collaboration with the NWHC, Oregon Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, Fort Collins Science Center, state wildlife agencies (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin), universities (University of Montana, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, and Purdue University), and national and regional associations of fish and wildlife agencies.
The project will engage landowners, hunters, and agency experts to generate and prioritize interventions, initially drawing on six behavior change strategies: correcting social norm misperceptions, emphasizing relevance, engaging future thinking, temptation bundling, offering incentives, and removing behavioral constraints. Multiple interventions will be tested using a rigorous experimental design at both the landowner and township level, with outcomes measured through surveys, harvest data, deer density monitoring, and CWD surveillance. A multi-part statistical strategy will help identify which interventions are associated with changes in harvest and deer densities.
What are the benefits?
The project will give state agencies an expert-generated, experimentally validated causal model of hunter and landowner behavior related to cervid harvest; a toolkit of vetted interventions scalable to other contexts; and a tool to predict the relative harvest and density outcomes of different interventions before deploying them. It will also produce standardized data collection protocols across states, a centralized data repository, and at least one peer-reviewed publication describing the project's methodology and outcomes—enabling agencies to move from a business-as-usual approach to evidence-based deer and disease management grounded in real behavioral data.
What have we accomplished?
This project is the outcome of a structured decision making (SDM) process led by MTCWRU in conjunction with the CWD Research Consortium's Objective 4 working group, which brought together state agencies, federal and academic researchers, and partners to design a coordinated multistate study to enhance and evaluate deer management approaches through stakeholder engagement. It also leverages ongoing CWD systems model research, which informs project goal setting and provides key information on the feasibility of management interventions.
What are the next steps?
The project is in a pilot stage, designing interstate deer survey methods and conducting qualitative research with experts, stakeholders, and landowners to understand and characterize the local contexts in which the experimental interventions will be deployed. Subsequent stages will include expert elicitation to prioritize interventions, pre-treatment surveys and deer density assessments, and finalizing the experimental design. Intervention delivery and monitoring will follow, along with analysis and delivery of products to communicate results to partners and the broader management community.