Wildcrafters who will discuss their work, a small subset of the reclusive group, tell varying stories about its abundance or paucity. Some see no problem, said Brian Jeffiers, the Johnson County agricultural agent in Paintsville, Kentucky.Others see a real issue. "For years it's been going down," said Crate McCarty, 65, a school bus driver in Paintsville. "One year back a long time ago, I dug about 15 pounds. Every year since, it's going down. Last year it was five pounds, the year before, seven. It's getting harder and harder to find.

"The current price is low by the standards of recent years. In the late 1990s, wild ginseng was known to fetch close to $500 a pound.

The Kentucky harvest of wild ginseng root is the largest in the country. The volume exported by the state has fluctuated widely, but the harvests in even the good years have gradually declined since 1996.R. Terry Jones, a state horticulturist based in the mine-pocked woodlands of eastern Kentucky, and his colleague Jo Wolf found that over 19 years, 21 percent of the ginseng plots in their original survey group had disappeared.

Some people see overzealous harvesting as the biggest problem. States "made rules and no one enforced them," Jones said, referring to state harvest seasons from mid-August until late autumn, created to comply with federal requirements.

A declining ginseng harvest would ripple through the local economy.

"The forests are a social safety net in Appalachia," said Brent Bailey, a research assistant professor of biology at West Virginia University, whose doctoral thesis found a strong positive correlation between ginseng harvests and the state unemployment rate. "Ginseng is Plan B for many households," he said in an interview in his office.

A few doors down in the university's biology department, James McGraw and Mary Ann Furedi have surveyed the effects of deer. They have collected five years' worth of data on 36 plots of ginseng in eight states.

Their work showed that anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent of the plants in these plots were browsed by deer every year. The roots tended to survive one or two leafless seasons, but struggled thereafter.

Walking in the woods a few miles from their Morgantown campus, the two pointed out a patch of perhaps seven ginseng plants, three with two or three leaf clusters, the rest small seedlings with just one.

There was no evidence of deer browsing, but the plants were less than two weeks old, and some ferns nearby did show the marks of grazing.

"I'm getting calls from Georgia and Virginia saying they have seen the same thing," McGraw said of his findings on the deer's effects.

The root is not likely to disappear suddenly, he said. "Our models suggest it will be a gradual petering out.

"Syl Yunker, who replants seeds in the Kentucky woods, creating what is known as wild simulated ginseng, says that wild turkeys, whose population is also exploding in eastern woodlands, are a bigger worry.