How would a biologist determine the number of deer in a forest?

just curious.How would a biologist determine the number of deer in a forest?
drive thru areas and count eyes with lights night survey ,, walk straight line count sightings night more accurate i dont think nra participates in surveys p@w departments are funded thru tax base and liscense sales via fishing and hunting and occassionly use voluntere helpHow would a biologist determine the number of deer in a forest?
There exist mathematical methods that allow scientists to calculate the number of individuals out of a given population based on the number of individuals caught in a given time frame, and how many were caught more than once, for example. This is a popular method for rare, shy animals - 'caught' means documented here, that can be done with an auto-trigggered camera too.


Or, if the resources are available, they can simply sit quiet with binoculars and cound the deer. They will often come out at nightt to graze on fields and pastures so you'll be good with a night scope too.


Or, NRA version: Send in a troop of hunters and count the bodies. Ahem.
There are several techniques. The U. of Mich. does an annual direct count at their reserve, with a line of people walking the entire reserve and counting the number of deer that run by to the right of each person. You can do dropping counts to estimate numbers. You can do mark-recapture studies to calculate numbers. You can fly over an area during the winter and photograph the deer, then count them in the photo. In theory, you can estimate the number by removing deer from the population, using equal effort each day and calculating how much time it would take to remove the entire population. This is not really good for deer, though. You can also get information from hunter surveys. This tells you mostly about population changes from year to year.





Population studies can be the subject of an entire graduate level course. A lot of fun, if you like math.
I guess they would search thoroughly a certain fraction of the land, then do the math,





like they might survey 1/3 of the land and them multiply the number of deer by 3.





It's just my guess though. They probably have better technology then that.