The mission oriented around a series of workshops with relevant stakeholders, which included many participants who are not usually involved in deer management activities and decisions (e.g., food justice and redistribution organisations, local councillors, academics and educators, animal welfare and countryside experts). By engaging a wider range of voices we were able to collectively explore and identify the challenges and opportunities of taking a more integrated and collaborative approach to managing deer at the landscape scale in the UK.

Above: “Deer management is a crucial issue for nature restoration, meaning that a more comprehensive way of managing deer could trigger significant change and have a range of benefits for biodiversity, climate change, ecosystem health and resilience, food security, nature connection, and rural incomes.”

The workshop series offered a valuable forum for diverse stakeholders to understand each other’s worldviews, priorities, values and perspectives on deer management. The key findings were:

• Deer management is an important issue for biodiversity renewal in the UK
• Deer populations require collaborative management to reduce negative social, economic and ecological impacts
• By using a participatory stakeholder process, different views were explored, and eight pathways were found to enhance cooperation on the goals of deer management
• A holistic and community-oriented approach is key to unlocking more innovative and effective deer management strategies, while new partnerships with the food justice sector could create opportunities for venison supply chains

It is vital to share data and evidence among stakeholders, and to communicate clearly and consistently to foster trust among organisations, and with broader audiences.

Above: Workshop particpants discussing their visions for future human-deer coexistence in the UK.

The Executive Summary and Full Mission Report (Published date: Thursday 22nd August 2024), provide more detail of our eight recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.

We will be discussing the findings and recommendations of ‘Seeing the forest for the deer’ at our online panel event on Monday 16^th September 1-2pm. You can find out more and sign up here:

Webinar: How stakeholder collaboration can improve landscape-scale deer management