Title: Exurban Development Associated with a National Wildlife Refuge - Implications for Deer Hunting and Management
Year: 2013
Abstract: Like most other areas in the eastern United States, liberal harvest opportunities throughout much of Minnesota have been made available to hunters over the past 10-20 years. Therefore, the effectiveness of recreational hunting as a deer population management tool depends, in large part, on hunter distribution and density. Our study documents the changing land-use patterns and exurban development adjacent to a National Wildlife Refuge within a 45-minute commute to the Minneapolis metropolitan area. We analyzed geo-spatial data from 1990-2010 that described human population growth rates or landscape factors that changed as a result of exurban development. We also analyzed the harvest distribution and intensity throughout the study area based on plotted harvest locations of harvested deer registered at check stations in 2003. Human population numbers more than doubled in the area adjacent to the Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge and the number of housing units increased by 114 percent between 1990 and 2010. We will describe these and other land-use shifts from a rural to exurban area, the uneven deer harvest distribution that occurred in and around the Wildlife Refuge, and discuss the possible implications for deer ecology and management based on a review of the literature.
