No. The data is incomplete but useful to compare regions. If we're going for frankness your ability to interpret it is ****.
It'd be one thing if you said something like, "Hmmm. New York seems to have pretty good trophy numbers per square mile. Body size and antler weight look good. Population seems high, but it's a blue state that's highly developed so it's possible actual hunter numbers make for much lower pressure and/or NYC skews the data." You could say, "Well, it for sure isn't the midwest, but for the Mid-Atlantic/Northeaster region that's actually not that bad and I bet there are areas where the hunting is probably quite good." You could say all kinds of things that may or not be true to various extents but would prove you could look at data and draw inferences.
But nah. "Grasping at straws", bruh. Data's junk. Nothing to see here.
For the rest of the tribe, I fully acknowledge not every deer gets reported. I personally believe the under/over reporting washes as a whole. Or at least it's more useful to assume it does than speculating about it without some way to quantify it. It's not like the data suggests something stupid like Iowa being a worse state than New York.
@Plebe hasn't been clear about what part of the data is **** but I'm assuming he's surprised at the difference between New York and Iowa? I think surprise is a valid reaction. I was shocked when I realized how bad Alabama sucked. Even the good parts. Then I started really thinking about it and firmly believe that the difference is real.
Here's why I think that using the P&Y database to help you pick an area to target scouting and then hunting efforts is perhaps the smartest move you can make as a hunter who wants to shoot more bucks.
P&Y bucks are a subset of the "big buck" set, which is a subset of the "buck set." It's very voluntary reporting, which sucks. But what if there was a way to take the voluntarily reported subset and compare it to a larger set of datapoints that were less voluntarily reported or ideally nonvoluntary? What if you had access to involuntarily reported data on just bucks killed in an area? If the P&Y subset tracked the bigger, involuntary set accurately, then it would be much more likely to be a useful set.
Luckily, Alabama DCNR has been pushing HARD to make "GameCheck" a thing. It's still not strictly involuntary, since you self report through snail mail, a phone call, or an app. But the barriers to entry are VERY low. Alabama puts the contact info all over your license, WMA check boards, and on the front of their digest that's carried in every gas station and tackle shop and hardware store in Alabama. Our DCNR director has leaned into it hard and for the past 2 years made it very clear that his game wardens would be checking out every pickup truck bed and skinning shed they could and you WOULD be getting a nice fat ticket if caught not reporting a deer. So instead of relying on whatever a P&Y reporter is, you're just relying on the guy who killed a buck being a law-abiding individual or an outlaw who feels the reward doesn't outweigh the risk.
Alabama has a very small (sub 200) amount of P&Y bucks to play with. So I added them to the AWR info which generally tracks with P&Y data. More P&Y deer in a county, more AWR deer in a county. Take the top 20 counties for "trophy" deer in alabama, divide them by the bucks reported via gamecheck, take the mean, average deviation, and standard deviation, and...
The Data Isn't ****
It isn't perfect. Far from it. But it tracks.
