Definitely watching this, thank you 🙏

and their selective browsing was negated by differing selective browsing traits of other herbivores. Forests would be more open, and retain high floral diversity. Now without other herbivores, their selective browsing is concentrated, and we end up with novel "deerscapes."

Interesting conversation on deer. One thought I've had is that the high abundance of deer might be a surrogate replacement for herbivore biomass which was once occupied by a diversity of herbivores. When more herbivore species were present, deer numbers were checked by food competition+

I don’t actually think the solution to that is less deer on the landscape. Severe browsing is not the issue to me — it’s the lack of recovery time (which predators might influence), and the over-emphasis on particular palatable species (which could be balanced by a greater diversity of herbivores)

The result is not a more open forest structure. Instead, the same density of hardwood stems reach maturity as would have otherwise, except only unpalatable species survive. No amount of deer can prevent a New York old field from succeeding into dense forest. They can only alter species composition

I’m open to new interpretations, but my experience of unmitigated deer browse in my region is that it often looks like set-stocking, selective grazing, and overgrazing (to use livestock terms)

I think about this often. Obviously nothing we can do comes close to megaherbivores, but I do think we can leverage our machinery (as long as fossil fuel remains cheap) to do a lot of good vegetation management work, and extract some amount of yield at the same time. Tough balance

Yes it’s a really crazy situation. We need large predators back on the landscape, and mega herbivores with different food preferences to balance the playing field. Until then, we have to keep deer moving in other ways to grant patches adequate recovery

Nor do I think they totally exclude deer — I think the “exclusion” is fear based (deer want clear escape routes) and imperfect, and the walls will degrade with time after saplings have passed deer browse height

I don’t have direct experience with these slash walls but I highly doubt they increase habitat fragmentation. In fact I would guess they make incredible habitat for smaller critters, much like European laid hedges, or larger fallen trees

I’m 100% on the same page, deer are magical woodland ruminants and what more could you ask for? Unfortunately until we reintroduce wolves and cougars, we have to get creative. I don’t even think our deer pop is necessarily too high, it just doesn’t move in the way it used to

This is a really good point. Another option might be to manage density across time and space (rather than overall landscape scale density) with structures like these slash walls they're experimenting with at Cornell, kinda parallel to how functional predator populations modulate herbivore movement

Here’s a grafted honey locust from one of those old farms. Once you see this stuff you can’t unsee it!!

Hersheys two farms are pretty mind blowing, even now after so many trees have been cut for development (I’ve been a few times to collect seed and scion with my old boss Buzz Ferver). There’s a number of other incredible spots in PA, contemporaries of Hershey

open.spotify.com/track/6GuiDC...