Student Research: "The Economic Value of Deer Hunting as an Ecosystem Service"

Bryn Mawr student Louisa Smythe wrote her senior project on deer hunting, evaluating the impact of hunter spending, use of deer for food, potential reduction in rates of the human Lyme disease (of which deer are an alternate host) and deer-vehicle collisions, and reduced damage to crops, timber, and residential and nursery plants.

Densities of deer populations increased dramatically in the twentieth century causing a high level of damage to heavily browsed vegetation. The report cites figures from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture on the economic cost of deer damage to timber, agriculture, and the nursery industries. High deer densities also can diminish the value of the habitat for other wildlife. And Lyme disease, caused by the spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi and transmitted by infected ticks of the species Ixodes ricinus, has high rates in Pennsylvania and Chester County in particular. (According to the Chester County Health Department there were 660 reported cases in 2005.)

Ms. Smythe surveyed hunters to determine how they spent money on hunting, how they used the deer for food, and gathered data on time spent hunting and success rates. She noted the benefits of outdoor recreation and hunters’ financial contributions to conservation but made no attempt to quantify them.

The report then uses rates of human infection, deer and human population size, and calculations of the cost of treatment at four stages of the disease to estimate the economic savings of lower deer densities for Lyme disease. A similar analysis was also done for deer-vehicle collisions.

Like all of these reports on the values of ecosystem services there are factors that are difficult to quantify and assumptions that limit the applicability of the results. But the studies also highlight how interrelated are the species around us, and the environment in which we live.