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That's some deep scientific stuff blacktail,

I do know that there are many folks out there especially in the timber industry that spend alot of time and miney worrying about all of these things that you have talked about as they relate to the growth of production timber. When I lived in northern California, I worked on equipment that monitored environmental forest conditions including soil temp/ soil moisture/ PH on commercial forest lands. I know that they publish some of this data on their website sometimes and that might be helpful to those hunting northern and central California. You can go to WWW.spi-ind.com and select the our forest option, then select research and monitoring. There are some neat studies on wildlife as well. I'm not sure if these factors would be enough to help determine a trophy area, but they will definately determine where the good feed is, and thus where deer populations will be. I think that the key to trophy quality is much simpler. Age, age, age. I think that any deer population will produce some trophy bucks if the bucks are allowed to reach maturity, 5-6 years, and breed at this age. I also believe that areas with poor genetics would sort themselves out in time if the pressure was relieved enough to allow natural genetic selection to drive the reproduction of the species. I guess the question is: are enough of us patient enough to quit shooting young deer in order to allow some trophy recovery in our herds? That might mean going a few years without killing one, kind of like me this year.----shooter