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Summary: A Systematic Review of Wild Burro Grazing Effects on Mojave
Desert Vegetation, USA
Scott R. Abella
Received: 19 July 2007 / Accepted: 27 February 2008 / Published online: 1 April 2008
Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract Wild burros (Equus asinus), protected by the
1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act on some
federal lands but exotic animals many ecologists and
resource mangers view as damaging to native ecosystems,
represent one of the most contentious environmental
management problems in American Southwest arid lands.
This review synthesizes the scattered literature about burro
effects on plant communities of the Mojave Desert, a
center of burro management contentions. I classified 24
documents meeting selection criteria for this review into
five categories of research: (i) diet analyses directly
determining which plant species burros consume, (ii) uti-
lization studies of individual species, (iii) control-impact
comparisons, (iv) exclosure studies, and (v) forage analyses
examining chemical characteristics of forage plants. Ten
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