Wilderness science in a time of change conference—Volume 5: Wilderness ecosystems, threats, and management; 1999 May 23–27; Missoula, MT

Recreation livestock (horses, mules, llamas, and goats) use accounts for 11% of all wilderness visits, and production livestock (cattle and sheep) use occurs in 37% of all wilderness areas. Recreation use is expected to increase at the same rate as total wilderness use, but production use will change little. Managers should recognize that the relationship between the severity of impacts and the intensity of livestock use can be linear or curvilinear because different management approaches will be effective for each type of relationship. Improved livestock management will occur with greater coordination of knowledge and staff in range and wilderness management. Recreation and production livestock in wilderness are authorized under different provisions in the Wilderness Act, and distinct tools and criteria are prescribed to manage their impacts. Recreation livestock use conforms to the recreational mission of the Act and is subject to full discretionary interpretation by agencies to manage that use within levels consistent with a goal of maintaining the wilderness character of an area. In contrast, production livestock use is one of five uses (mining, aircraft & motorboats, control of fire, disease & insects, water resources facilities, and livestock grazing) that were granted special status to continue in wilderness if they existed prior to designation. Further, some provisions for production livestock management explicitly ignore the wilderness character goal of an area, leaving little room for discretionary interpretation by the agencies. Each type of livestock use produces impacts from defoliation, trampling, concentration of animal waste, reduction of wildlife, conflicts with other users, and as vectors for the spread of noxious species. However, the expression of these impacts can be quite different between recreation and production livestock use. Both the relationships among the intensity, timing and type of use, and their spatial arrangement and impacts differ between types of livestock. Recognizing these similarities and differences, can assist in improving livestock management in wilderness. To this end, this state-of-knowledge review of livestock use in wilderness will (1) describe the extent of occurrence and managers’ concerns about the two livestock uses, (2) compare the nature and management implications of impacts caused by the types of livestock, (3) compare the legal framework and administrative tools applied to management of recreation and production livestock in wilderness, and (4) outline the challenges to management, and the research and development that can improve livestock management in wilderness. Recreation livestock in wilderness are the horses mules, burros, llamas, and goats that are used as beasts-of-burden to carry people or their belongings. Production livestock in wilderness are sheep and cattle raised for meat, wool, and leather products. Packstock is a common synonym for recreation livestock (for example, McClaran 1989), and domestic livestock is a synonym for livestock grazing on federal lands (36 Code of Federal Regulations 222.1 (1998); 43 Code of Federal Regulations 4100.5 (1998). This paper uses the terms recreation livestock and production livestock because the shared noun stresses the similarities of the impacts and management principles for these two groups of animals, and “production” is used rather than domestic because all these animals are domesticated. Finally, the term recreation livestock is consistent with regulations promulgated by the USDA Forest Service and USDI Bureau of Land Management (36 Code of Federal Regulations 293.3 (1998); 43 Code of Federal Regulations 8560.1 (1998). Wilderness areas that receive either of these two types of livestock use are most common west of the Mississippi River including Alaska and Hawaii (McClaran and Cole 1993; Washburne and Cole 1983). Recreation livestock use occurs most frequently in areas administered by the Forest Service (FS) and Bureau of Land Management (BLM), to a lesser degree in USDI National Park Service (NPS) areas, and rarely in USDI Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) areas. In general, production livestock use in wilderness follows a very similar pattern of occurrence among agencies, except for a lower frequency in NPS areas. Beyond the practical matters of where, when, and how livestock use occurs in wilderness, it has played a role in the evolution of important wilderness concepts and in the articulation of congressional guidelines for wilderness management. Leopold’s (1921) original definition of wilderness proposed that the minimum size of wilderness be large enough to allow for a two-week recreation livestock trip. The first studies of recreation impacts in wilderness focused on recreation livestock in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in the 1940s, where Sumner (1942) devised the precursor to the concept of recreational carrying capacity as a tool to set use limits that would not impair “the essential qualities of the area. ” Production livestock grazing was included as an accepted use in the first wilderness established in 1924, and that status has not faced serious challenge (McClaran 1990). To some, the inclusion of production livestock grazing privileges was a simple exchange for rancher acceptance of wilderness designation (Roth 1984). To the contrary, Leopold (1921) suggested that benefits would accrue to both recreationists and ranchers because livestock production under frontier conditions