Case Study: University of Texas at San Antonio achieves actionable urban deer maps to inform management and reduce conflicts with Trimble

University of Texas at San Antonio - Customer Case Study

Stephen C. Brown of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences led a wildlife study for the Hollywood Park City Council Deer Committee to address a 300-member white-tailed deer herd in a northern San Antonio suburb. The herd was causing landscape damage, vehicle collisions and disease concerns, and traditional wildlife-survey methods proved impractical or politically sensitive in a dense, residential setting.

The team mounted a laser rangefinder to a pickup and linked it to a Trimble GPS Pathfinder Pro XRS receiver to record distance-and-bearing offsets to deer from public streets; three-person teams drove transects, collected GPS points, and exported shapefiles for GIS analysis. Mapping feeder-house locations and running a 200‑m buffer showed most deer clustered near feeders, leading the city to enact a no‑feeding ordinance in 2001 and to live‑trap and relocate roughly half the herd in 2002 — a practical demonstration of GPS/GIS field data collection for urban wildlife management.

University of Texas at San Antonio

Stephen C. Brown

University of Texas at San Antonio