When Trinity and Lewiston Reservoirs were filled between 1960 and 1963, 17,250 acres of prime winter deer range and an estimated 4,000 to 7,500 deer, or about 1,000,000 annual deer days of use (DDU), were lost. The Shasta-Trinity National Forest recently began a habitat improvement program of prescribed burning (4,500 acres thus far) after earlier mitigation attempts (1965-1970) met with limited success. A preliminary goal programming model, based on land near Trinity and Lewiston Reservoirs, was built to estimate the potential of the habitat improvement program and to explore trade-offs between deer and timber production. Assuming all brush-covered areas adjacent to the reservoirs were treated periodically with fire, only about 332,000 DDU could be regained. Even by foregoing some 12,400,000 board feet of timber production annually and converting all the land adjacent to the reservoirs to deer habitat, only 813,000 DDU could be regained. Under more realistic ecological and managerial constraints only about 38,000 DDU will be regained, and by also foregoing about 1,000,000 board feet of timber growth, only about 100,000 DDU would be regained. Estimates of the cost of a deer day of use or a deer bagged by a hunter are extremely high in this analysis, yet they include only the cost of timber foregone. The lack of an antlerless harvest would result in few of the increased deer being utilized by sport hunters. Additional potential for mitigation exists on other Forest Service, BLM, and private land in Trinity County.
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