Least-effort pathways?: a GIS analysis of livestock trails in rugged terrain

Livestock trails frequently evolve in pastures when plant growth or establishment cannot keep pace with vegetation disturbance. In some instances, man-made trails are established in rangeland settings to encourage uniform use of forages or facilitate livestock passage through dense vegetation or across rugged terrain. A long-term assumption has been that livestock establish pathways of least resistance between frequented areas of their pastures, but this hypothesis has never been tested. We mapped cattle trails in three 800+ ha pastures with global positioning units. A geographic information system (GIS) helped quantify characteristics of trails and the landscape and was used to plot least-effort pathways between water sources and distant points on selected trails in the pastures. Characteristics of the cattle trails and least-effort pathways were compared to test the hypothesis that cattle develop least-effort routes of travel in rugged terrain. The mean slope of the three pastures was 13.5%, and the average slope of the topography traversed by the cattle trails was 8%. The slope of the trails was reduced to 5.2% by selection of cross-slope routes. When we compared the characteristics of 10 selected cattle trails and least-effort pathways generated by our GIS, the cattle trails were 11% shorter (P=0.046) than the least-effort pathways, and the topography traversed by cattle had a gradient about 1% less than the least-effort pathways (P=0.02). The slope of the selected trails (5.5%) and pathways (5.6%) were similar (P=0.74), however. Analyses of values extracted from cost surfaces indicated that, on the average, 183 units of effort were needed to traverse the trails and 170 units of effort expended to traverse the least-effort pathways (P=0.07). These data support the hypothesis that cattle establish least-effort routes between distant points in rugged terrain and suggest that GIS software may be useful in designing systems of livestock trails in extensive settings.