Shortlisted for the Georgina Mace Prize 2024
Kristy Ferraro shares insights into her team’s study researching how removing deer carcasses during the culling process can negatively impact ecosystems.
About the Research
Overview
Our study quantifies a largely overlooked consequence of Scotland’s widespread deer culling practices—the loss of essential elements from ecosystems due to carcass removal. While deer management is a critical tool for ecosystem recovery in the highly managed Scottish landscape, the prevailing approach of removing carcasses means that elements such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and calcium are extracted from the landscape instead of being recycled back into the environment. By quantifying the loss of these elements across different land classifications within Scotland, our work highlights the potential long-term implications for soil fertility, plant communities, and broader ecosystem recovery efforts. Our goal is to spark conversations about how to balance effective deer management with ecological restoration, ensuring that current practices do not inadvertently undermine conservation goals.
Surprises and challenges
One of the biggest surprises was the level of public interest the paper generated. Thanks to a press release from the British Ecological Society and a highlight in The Niche, our findings reached a wide audience and sparked incredible engagement. As early-career researchers, Dr. Hirst and I were excited to see such interest in the ecological impacts of deer management—especially since the impact of animals on element cycling is often overlooked in conservation.
A challenge we navigated was the inherently contentious nature of deer management. To ensure our work was accessible and useful to a broad audience—including policymakers, land managers, and conservationists—we made a deliberate effort to use a value-neutral approach and value-neutral language throughout our analysis and interpretation. By allowing the data to speak for itself, we sought to provide an objective foundation for discussions about deer culling practices. Regardless of different perspectives on deer management, our results highlight the need to reconsider current approaches and explore strategies that allow for a portion of carcasses to remain in ecosystems.
Next steps and broader implications
Our study highlights the need for a comprehensive understanding of the role of deer ecosystems—setting aside the biases we often bring to the study of deer. Deer are frequently framed as either destructive over-browsers or keystone species, but a more nuanced approach is needed to grasp the complexity of their ecological functions.
To ensure that deer management is aligned with ecosystem recovery goals, the impacts of large-scale carcass removal need to be explored at finer spatial scales. This exploration will help identify where targeted changes can balance ecological and restoration benefits with practical land management considerations. Additionally, an important next step is evaluating alternative solutions to deer management—such as reintroducing predators, leaving carcasses on the landscape, or implementing fertility control—through the lens of ecological effectiveness, respect for the animals, and social acceptability.
Our research has direct implications for deer management policy and conservation practices in Scotland and beyond. It highlights an overlooked consequence of current culling practices—the gradual depletion of essential elements from ecosystems. Thus, our findings suggest that deer management strategies should consider not just population control but also the ecological role of deer.
Our study also demonstrates the power of using publicly available data to generate meaningful insights for conservation. By leveraging statutory deer cull reports and high-resolution habitat data—collected and maintained by government and non-profit organizations —we are able to quantify element losses at a national scale. This approach demonstrates the immense value of publicly funded data, which is often underutilized, in generating meaningful insights for policymakers and practitioners. In particular, NatureScot’s commitment to maintaining high-quality ecological datasets has been instrumental. We hope our study underscores the importance of continued investment in public data collection and fosters stronger collaboration between scientists, land managers, and conservationists to ensure that ecological research translates into practical, on-the-ground insights.
About the Author
Getting involved in ecology
I’ve always been fascinated by the ways animals matter—both in the roles they play in ecosystems and in their intrinsic value as living beings. This curiosity was instilled in me early. As a child, I spent countless houses in the woods, where I was captivated by the processes that underpinned the natural world and animal life. I was the kid constantly asking “how?” and “why?”—and I never outgrew it.
That early love for the natural world, and especially the need to understand how it all worked, eventually led me to ecology, where I now study how animals interact with the ecosystems they inhabit. I’m particularly interested in understanding how they shape the landscapes they move through and contribute to element cycles in ways we’re only beginning to appreciate. I believe that the more we learn about ecosystems and animals, the more we appreciate their complexity. And when we recognize something as complex, we’re more likely to respect and protect it.
Current position
I’m currently a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial University in Canada, working with Drs. Shawn Lerox and Eric Vander Wal. Together, we are exploring the roles of deer species, including caribou and moose, in Boreal systems.
Current research focus
A major focus of my research is how deer species influence the biogeochemical cycles of northern ecosystems—ranging from caribou in Newfoundland to red deer in Scotland. I’m currently working on several empirical and review papers exploring this theme, including a literature review on the ecological roles of mammal carcasses in northern systems.
Advice for fellow ecologists
One piece of advice I’d give to someone working at the intersection of ecology and conservation is to embrace a diversity of methods. The biggest questions in ecology and conservation often can’t be answered with just one approach. Developing theory sharpens the conceptual foundation of our work, modeling allows us to test ideas across scales and species, and fieldwork grounds everything in real-world complexity. Each method has its strengths and limitations, but together, they provide a more complete and nuanced understanding of ecological processes. So never limit yourself to just one tool in the toolbox.
Read the full article ‘Missing carcasses, lost nutrients: Quantifying nutrient losses from deer culling practices in Scotland’ in Ecological Solutions and Evidence.
Find the other early career researchers and their articles that have been shortlisted for the Georgina Mace Prize 2024 here!
