As much as I can I have been trying to keep you up to date with the efforts of the Western Association of Fisheries and Wildlife Agencies (WAFA) Mule Deer Working Group. As a brief reminder this group was established back in 1998 for the sole purpose of identifying critical issues facing mule deer and to work together to come up with viable solutions to these issues and problems. Their mission will be a daunting task that can’t be done alone; find solutions to our common mule deer management problems and to optimize cooperative research and management in the Western states and provinces.

One of the things the group was tasked to do was to identify and classify mule deer habitat range wide. Many of the states already had some type of map or maps that identified certain types of mule deer habitat on a state level. Utah for example has a map where they have identified winter and summer ranges for mule deer state wide. Other states had nothing. While some data did exist, each state had done things differently or had excluded or included habitat types that other states did not include. When the WAFWA Mule Deer Working Group began planning for a Joint Venture Habitat Restoration Project, they found that the lack of these databases made cross-jurisdiction project planning impossible. They further believed that other planning projects have been stymied by the lack of this planning tool.

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Would you like to see a sample map from the mule deer mapping project?  Click here.

Click here to read a report from the Associated Press on the Mule Deer Mapping Project.