A project to assess and track the country’s wild deer population is to be carried out by UCD using €244,800 funding from the Department of Agriculture.

Project leader Simone Ciuti, assistant professor of wildlife biology, said there will be three parts to the project.

This data will be aggregated into an open-access library, creating an evidence base that will drive deer management decisions

“We will collect and amalgamate the deer data collected by stakeholders over the last 25 years. There is a lot of information – but it’s not available to hand. Sources include culling data in National Parks and Wildlife, observations by professional stalkers, earlier projects by the Department of Agriculture and data on traffic collisions.”

“This data will be aggregated into an open-access library, creating an evidence base that will drive deer management decisions.”

He said: “Secondly, we will produce the most up-to-date distribution maps of deer species around the country. We will identify hotspots of human-deer conflicts to prevent forest damage, traffic collisions and interaction with livestock.”

Phone app

Finally, the team will create a phone app to allow hunters, walkers, farmers and other interested individuals to report deer sightings.

This will allow tracking of the wild deer population on an ongoing basis.

New evidence-based guidelines for the management of the wild deer population will be released at the end of this project.