Translating research into practice

Government agencies are now starting to consider deer and their impacts in the wider context of ecosystem services. Our recent research developed a participatory framework which has informed disputes over deer management among neighbours and between policy makers and practitioners. This showed the value of co-construction of maps to combine practitioner and scientific knowledge across a landscape to create a better understanding of the distribution of a mobile resource such as deer, and so provide a vehicle for negotiating adaptive management options.

To build on these results, this follow-on project will provide support and training to help conservation agency staff to incorporate this participatory framework into practice, so that they can engage with land-managers to develop shared resource maps and foster collaboration over public and private objectives. This project aims to use a participatory, action learning approach to develop three core skills that are essential to the process:

1. participatory techniques to identify management issues;
2. collating knowledge relevant to the landscape scale deer operate over using GIS;
3. analysing the knowledge to inform management issues.

This project will be undertaken as a trilateral in which stakeholders, policymakers and researchers work together in an adaptive and interactive manner and will lead to the co-production of a 'Best Practice' guide for developing sustainable deer management plans.