Mapping the Global Distribution of Livestock

Abstract

Livestock contributes directly to the livelihoods and food security of almost a billion people and affects the diet and health of many more. With estimated standing populations of 1.43 billion cattle, 1.87 billion sheep and goats, 0.98 billion pigs, and 19.60 billion chickens, reliable and accessible information on the distribution and abundance of livestock is needed for a many reasons. These include analyses of the social and economic aspects of the livestock sector; the environmental impacts of livestock such as the production and management of waste, greenhouse gas emissions and livestock-related land-use change; and large-scale public health and epidemiological investigations. The Gridded Livestock of the World (GLW) database, produced in 2007, provided modelled livestock densities of the world, adjusted to match official (FAOSTAT) national estimates for the reference year 2005, at a spatial resolution of 3 minutes of arc (about 5×5 km at the equator). Recent methodological improvements have significantly enhanced these distributions: more up-to date and detailed sub-national livestock statistics have been collected; a new, higher resolution set of predictor variables is used; and the analytical procedure has been revised and extended to include a more systematic assessment of model accuracy and the representation of uncertainties associated with the predictions. This paper describes the current approach in detail and presents new global distribution maps at 1 km resolution for cattle, pigs and chickens, and a partial distribution map for ducks. These digital layers are made publically available via the Livestock Geo-Wiki (http://www.livestock.geo-wiki.org), as will be the maps of other livestock types as they are produced.

Assessment of Anthropogenic Methane Emissions over Large Regions Based on GOSAT Observations and High Resolution Transport Modeling

“…In addition, northwestern and northeastern India, having rice paddy fields, show high anomalies in the 2 • averages pictures. The locations of high concentrations also coincide with high livestock density (e.g., [43,44]). Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, etc.…”

Global manure nitrogen production and application in cropland during 1860–2014: a 5 arcmin gridded global dataset for Earth system modeling

“…Thus, manure nitrogen production may be overestimated in the past, and the relative contribution of cattle and chickens to the total manure production may be overestimated since their carcass weight grows much faster than other livestock. Third, the uniform excretion rate for specific livestock types at the regional scale could bring some uncertainties without considering the feed availability and quality across different seasons and various regions (Ouyang et al, 2013;Rufino et al, 2014). For example, Ouyang et al (2013) provided the provincial N excretion rate in China, ranging from 53 to 94 kg N animal −1 yr −1 for dairy cattle and 17 to 36 kg N animal −1 yr −1 for other cattle.…”

“…The original Gridded Livestock of the World (GLW) database (Wint and Robinson, 2007) was further revised and improved through the collection of more up-to-date livestock statistics and the application of finer-resolution predictor variables and more reasonable analytical procedures to develop the Global Livestock Impact Mapping System (GLIMS, also called GLW2; Robinson et al, 2014). GLIMS offers an exceptional opportunity to improve manure data from earlier studies and extend our knowledge of manure production over a century-long period (Robinson et al, 2014).…”

“…GLIMS offers an exceptional opportunity to improve manure data from earlier studies and extend our knowledge of manure production over a century-long period (Robinson et al, 2014). Thus, the major objective of this study is to produce global gridded maps of manure nitrogen production at a 5 arcmin resolution in latitude by longitude during 1860-2014.…”

Modelling recent and future climatic suitability for fasciolosis in Europe

“…Animal densities (sheep, goat and cattle) were derived from the Livestock Geo-Wiki database (Robinson et al, 2014). This dataset is global and we interpolated the data to a regular 0.25º x 0.25º grid covering Europe.…”