Information concerning the spatial ecology of free-roaming horses and burros in the United States is severely lacking. Better understanding movement patterns and resource selection of wild equids is critical for improving management of these controversial animals. To improve such knowledge, we initiated a GPS-tracking project on wild horses in the Red Desert of Wyoming. In 2017, we fit 30 adult mares with GPS collars in the Adobe Town Herd Management Area (HMA) of southcentral Wyoming. The Adobe Town HMA has an area of 1,295 m2 (500 mi2) that contains large swaths of private land and crucial habitat for multiple wildlife species. This area is characterized as high-elevation desert, restricted by precipitation and includes sagebrush (Artemisia spp.) and saltbush (Atriplex spp.) communities, and juniper (Juniperus spp.) dominated ridges. Here we present preliminary data on daily movement rates, mean home ranges, and utilization distributions of wild horses in the Red Desert. We discuss how utilization distributions overlap with sociopolitical boundaries such as private land, neighboring HMAs, adjacent states, and important wildlife habitat. We present additional findings on how vegetation structure and composition changes along a gradient of horse utilization. We also discuss future directions of our project, which includes an examination of horse impacts on sympatric wildlife and livestock species and how horse home ranges and movement patterns may shift in response to removal gathers.
Oral presentation and poster titles, abstracts, and authors from the Society for Range Management (SRM) Annual Meetings and Tradeshows, from 2013 forward.