PITTSBURGH — The state is expanding its aerial deer survey program, having a contractor fly over 505,000 acres of state forest and game lands this year — more than twice as much ground as was covered last year.

The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is paying Idaho-based Vision Air Research 50 cents an acre, the same rate it paid for last year's survey of about 200,000 acres.

"Until we have the best consensus around the deer population and habitat destruction, we will be forever locked in a battle of too few versus too many," said Michael DiBerardinis, the department's secretary.

Most of the areas to be surveyed are in the central and north central part of the state, where hunters say there are few deer and foresters say there is little forest regeneration, according to the department and the state Game Commission.

Ted Onufrak, president of the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, an umbrella group of about 102,000 members representing some 300 clubs, said the surveys made sense.

"Any data that you get in addition to what the Game Commission already has is going to be helpful in making deer management decision," he said.

Included in the surveys are parts of state forest land in the game commission's three-year-old deer management assistance program, which commission spokesman Jerry Feaser said "focuses hunter pressure on where it is needed most."

The program is also open to private landowners, typically farms where crops are being damaged by deer. The landowners get coupons that they can give to hunters, who redeem them for antlerless deer permits for that property.

No changes have been made to the program based on last year's findings. Feaser said that while the surveys will provide additional information on deer behavior, they "are not going to, by themselves, alter deer management decisions."

The commission does not have a statewide deer population estimate, Feaser said, nor are the aerial surveys intended to provide that. The surveys, he said, "are a snapshot in time. It gives you data about minimum deer sightings on a given day and time at a specific location."

The surveys began Tuesday night and will continue, depending on weather, until spring leaf growth makes spotting deer too difficult.

Last year's survey found the highest concentrations of deer in the Promised Land area of the Delaware State Forest, Pike County, where about 24 deer were found per square mile. The lowest concentrations were in a section of Sproul State Forest in Centre and Clinton counties, with about nine deer per square mile.