An abundance estimate of free-roaming horses on the Navajo Nation

Abstract

Free-roaming horses (Equus ferus caballus) occur throughout arid and semiarid regions of the western United States, where they can decrease plant biomass and diversity, impair water quality, and reduce forage available to native wildlife and domestic livestock. Management of free-roaming horses on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and US Forest Service lands is determined by protections and population targets established by law, but these do not apply to other federal or Tribal Lands, where relatively little is known about the abundance and distribution of free-roaming horses. To address this information gap, we conducted the first comprehensive survey of free-roaming horses within the Navajo Nation, which is the largest Tribal Land holding in the contiguous United States and covers portions of the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. We used stratified random sampling and double-observer distance methods to produce estimates of horse abundance corrected for detection bias. During the summer of 2016, we used fixed-wing aircraft to survey 4 975 km of transects across our 67 089-km2 study area. We observed 4 290 horses distributed among 527 groups and estimated 38 223 horses lived within the study area during the survey period (standard of error [SE]: 6 052, 90% confidence interval: 29 365–47 080), with 29 394 horses in open areas (SE: 5 511, 90% confidence interval [CI]: 21 328–37 460) and 8 829 horses in forested areas (SE: 2 331, 90% CI: 5 417–12 240). Overall density of 0.570 horses/km2 (SE: 0.090, 90% CI: 0.438–0.702) was 23% higher than density of horses and burros (Equus asinus) in all BLM herd management areas (HMAs) in 2016 and exceeded by 17% the density in Nevada, the only state with an HMA of comparable size to the Navajo Nation. Our results will inform management of a free-roaming horse population that this study has revealed to be the among the largest in the United States.