ZLV Online

Abstract

The European territory has undergone significant changes in the last decades in forming and use of landscape, especially from the agricultural perspective. These changes in combination with other factors have caused increase of large ungulate population. The red deer (Cervus elaphus) belongs to the species that has been growing in numbers. As for the game management, it is necessary to establish numbers of game in particular area, and that is possible using direct and indirect counting methods. In this paper we assess the progress of deer numbers during the years 2015 and 2016 using fecal pellet group counting method at individual transects in the Blatenský Vrch (BV) and Zlatý Kopec (ZK) hunting districts. In the BV hunting district, there were estimated 9.6 ± 7.6 deer individuals per 100 ha in the year 2015, and 9.7 ± 4.8 deer per 100 ha in 2016. In the ZK the deer numbers were estimated at 7.8 ± 2.9 indd per 100 ha in 2015, and 6.1 ± 5.3 indd per 100 ha in the following year. There were no statistically detectable differences found among the years and hunting districts.