Many ginseng collectors plant seeds of the endangered medical herb in the Pennsylvanian forests where they collect it, but that could have both positive and negative impacts on the plant, according to Penn State researchers.

The seed planting could conserve and supplement what remains of the wild populations of the plant valued for its medicinal qualities in the forests where it grows in Pennsylvania, and likely much of Appalachia.

But the seeds they are planting often are purchased online from shaded field operations with inputs such as fertilizer outside of the Appalachians, and that could be weakening the gene pool of the existing plant populations.

The research was designed to pick up on trends like that in the growing, if secretive, ginseng industry in Pennsylvania and determine how best to support and track ginseng forest farming, according to Eric Burkhart, associate teaching professor of ecosystem science and management in the College of Agricultural Sciences, who led the research.

“With Pennsylvania exporting around 1,000 pounds of dried ginseng roots in most years during the past decade, we’re trying to better understand where it all is coming from, since most forestlands in Pennsylvania are privately owned, and harvesting from public lands is not permissible,” said Burkhart, who also is program director of Appalachian botany and ethnobotany at Penn State’s Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center.

Researchers used a confidential, annual survey sent to Pennsylvania ginseng sellers over the past eight years to examine the extent to which forest farming and planting of commercially acquired seeds might contribute to wild ginseng harvest amounts.

They found that nearly three in 10 ginseng root sellers reported that some of the ginseng they sold as wild was produced through forest farming based on the seeds they scattered among the trees. More than a quarter of them said they used commercially available planting stock in their forest farming efforts.

“It’s very difficult to track the growth of this industry and its contributions to Pennsylvania wild exports because most in the ginseng industry have reservations or concerns about government tracking and involvement,” Burkhart said.

Landowners and ginseng diggers fear price devaluation, theft and taxation, and often disagree over what constitutes truly wild plant material, Burkhart explained.

Fawns’ reaction to danger

When white-tailed deer fawns perceive constant danger from many sources, they almost seem to relax, according to a new Penn State study.

Using trail cameras, researchers observed that young white-tailed deer perceiving an overload of danger around them seem to come to a state where they see no point in being ready to hide or flee.

With less than half of all fawns surviving their first year, the young cervids already “instinctively know they are in constant danger” from predators like coyotes, black bears and bobcats, said Asia Murphy, who recently graduated with a doctorate from Penn State’s Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Ecology.

And the presence of humans around the fawns ratchets up the stress the young animals experience, she noted. Even if it’s just people hiking on a trail in a state park, it is a disturbance to be avoided by fawns, leaving less landscape and less time for them to feed and evade predators.

“The presence of people creates an environment where the danger seems so high that the animals basically stop having vigilance behaviors,” she said. “That was the surprising thing about my research. When fawns perceive that there is so much danger coming from so many sources, their behavior seemed like they just relaxed, like there’s no point in being ready to hide or flee. I saw that in older deer too.”

In areas where there are many predators and people present, fawns seem to relax instead of acting hypervigilant.

“Like so much constant stress leaves them burned out,” Murphy explained.

The goal of the study was to examine how human-dominated landscapes influence the timing, frequency and physical spacing and locations of interactions between humans, black bears, coyotes, bobcats and fawns, as well as to contrast deer vigilance behavior at each location.