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"This is not a deer happy place at all," eighth-grader Reid Willis said as he slipped on a tree root while hiking into the muskeg along Fish Creek Road in North Douglas. "I am going to be happily surprised if I find any scat here."

Willis and roughly 140 of his Dzantik'I Heeni Middle School classmates were conducting a deer study Thursday as part of an on-going science project. This is the second time the school has sent their future scientists out into the wild of North Douglas in pursuit of deer sign. Two years ago the class discovered what area hunters and Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists confirmed: Deer are not as plentiful there as in other hunting districts.

"Hopefully we will keep building on that initial study," math and science teacher Dave Kovach said. "Our data collection will not be complete this year until we return from the field, go over results and figures, and kids write their studies. We hope this year's data, added to two years ago and supported two years from now, will give us a nice base and we hope to collect many years' worth of results to look at for population trends over time."

The immediate benefit now for students is the opportunity to use their science and math skills in the real world. Students focus on correlating relationships between deer populations and habitat characteristics such as the overhead forest canopy's affect on vegetation.

"This is an uneven age forest," eighth-grader Hannah Cassell said as she peered up through a tangle of brush while shooting a compass point. "It is a mixed age. There are new plants and old plants, young trees and old trees, and a partially open canopy."

Students studied muskeg, edge of forest, and forest sites at low, medium and high elevation. In teams of three - a blazer, a spotter and a recorder - they hiked for five minutes to a half an hour to reach the designated sites. Teachers had flagged the initial sites two years ago in the study and again last weekend.

The students concentrated on looking for deer scat and four particular plants trailing deer find appealing: trailing raspberry, bunchberry, fern leaf golden thread and foam flower. Students searched in 1-meter square plots, repeating the process five times in other plots.

Students will compile the information they collected, relating deer scat per square meter to canopy cover, elevation and food presence and eventually put it down in a scientific write up. Kovach hopes to have Fish and Game biologists look at the work and give advice for improvement.

"If the Fish and Game were to conduct this study and have it hold up and be valid within the scientific community, they would do many, many, many more trials than what we do," Kovach said. "Our goal is for the kids to understand how science works and how science can be used to answer questions. What we like to emphasize in scientific studies is that even if they don't go the way expected and your hypothesis is not correct, than any good study will lead to more questions. That is one of the things they take away from it ... and they enjoy getting outside and understanding the environment their community is in."

The students are also encouraged to think of a new question that would present a new challenge, or stimulate new interest.

"We are learning how scientists study deer and how many plants are in, like, the whole Tongass National Forest," eighth-grader Tori Ross said. "I would hate to be a deer, what I learned today about the vegetation here it seems to be not what deer prefer."

• Contact Klas Stolpe at klas.stolpe@juneauempire.com.