The year 2016 marked the 10-year anniversary of the publication of the "Livestock's Long Shadow" FAO report [1]. This landmark report influenced scientific and public perceptions of the role of livestock as a driver of environmental impacts-for example, high greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) or threats to biodiversity. The report pinpointed livestock production as producing 8-18% of all global GHG emissions. Meat, and particularly beef, is the food product responsible for the highest emissions [2,3]. Reducing the global effects of animal production requires two complementary and non-exclusive strategies: demand-side change and supply-side optimization. Demand-side changes, such as a change in consumer preferences towards plant-based diets, or active discouragement of meat consumption, which would probably require major policy and economic instruments, given the current importance of the animal sector in most countries (the animal production sector is globally worth 1.4 T€). Global per capita consumption of meat grew from 38.9 kg to 42.2 kg between 2005 and 2011, mostly due to increased demand in developing countries. The average annual increase in global meat demand is estimated as 1. 3% until 2050 [4], in spite of diet changes in developed countries. Meat is not going away any time soon.Supply-side changes have been the focus of most research and are also the focus of the papers included in this Special Issue "Livestock Production and Industrial Ecology". As originally intended, this set of papers provides an updated look at the role of intensive and extensive animal production systems in sustainability, which can expand and improve on the findings of "Livestock's Long Shadow". Authors analyzed multiple animal production systems through the lens of industrial ecology and its quantitative tools. The analytical tools applied in these papers primarily used standard industrial ecology tools such as life cycle assessment (LCA), both attributional and consequential, and material and energy flow analysis. However, those tools were complemented with innovative features such as the application of inverse approaches for calibrating process-based models, the application of optimization algorithms, linear programming, as well as data mining. This plethora of tools is demonstrative of an increasingly multi-disciplinary effort to tackle the effects of animal production and reducing its environmental burden.Multiple papers focused on particular farm systems. Morais et al.[5] applied an inverse approach to calibrate the process-based Rothamsted carbon model (RothC) for estimating soil carbon dynamics in sown biodiverse permanent pastures rich in legumes (SBP) [6,7]. These grass-legume pastures with up to 20 species/cultivars increase grassland productivity [7] and sustainable stocking rates [8]. Previous research had shown that SBP can accelerate the rate of accumulation of soil organic matter [9] and, thus, sequester large quantities of carbon in soils [10], which can temporarily offset the carbon emissions from meat production. ...