Information for decision making may be publicly available, but costly to obtain. As an experiment in environmental scanning, the internet was searched on a daily basis over several years to collect information and provide analysis related to decisions on deer management. The process discovered that, contrary to common assumptions, the U.S. deer population has apparently been falling since about the year 2000 based on analysis of available state data that had not been aggregated. In some cases, state population estimates were created using standard procedures on available data. Results indicate that differences in survey methods appear to be relatively constant over time as does the ratio of hunting data to official state population estimates. While reliability intervals for population estimates are wide, population trend reliability is relatively high. An analysis of Connecticut and California illustrate problems with the population estimates. In Connecticut, an independent group that financed some local surveys assert the state has overestimated the population. In California, some population estimates reported to the public are inconsistent with historic information, masking the dramatic decline of the deer population in the state.