Long-term, continuous, and spatially explicit monitoring of global livestock dynamics is fundamental to understanding issues related to food security, public health, ecological and environmental change, and sustainable development. Over the past decades, institutions such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) have accumulated extensive agricultural statistics. However, globally gridded livestock distribution products with both temporal and spatial continuity remain lacking, constraining in-depth research on agricultural carbon emissions, livestock management, climate change responses, and zoonotic disease control.

Against this backdrop, Associate Professor Yu Le’s Research Group at the Department of Earth System Science(DESS), Tsinghua University has developed the Annual Gridded Livestock of the World (AGLW) dataset, which maps the spatial distribution of eight major livestock types (cattle, buffaloes, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and ducks) annually. By integrating multi-source data on environmental factors, human activities, climate, and terrain, and using FROM-GLC Plus land cover data as a suitability mask, the study enhances the spatiotemporal continuity and spatial detail of global livestock distribution mapping.

Figure 1 The gridded livestock of the world (AGLW) dataset (take the density maps of 1961/1981/2001/2021 as examples).

The results demonstrate that the AGLW dataset achieves correlation coefficients (r) of 0.65–0.86 at the model level, 0.78–0.97 at the statistical level, and 0.78–0.88 at the pixel level, showing strong consistency with existing FAO GLW products while offering improved temporal completeness and spatial detail. This work provides a globally continuous, annual spatial sequence of livestock distributions spanning six decades, accompanied by per-pixel uncertainty layers for each year. It offers critical data support for studies on agricultural carbon emissions monitoring, sustainable development of global livestock systems, climate change response, and zoonotic disease transmission.

The above findings have been published in the journal Earth System Science Data under the title "Annual global gridded livestock mapping from 1961 to 2021". Associate Professor Du Zhenrong from the School of Information and Communication Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, is the first author, and Professor Yu Le from Tsinghua DESS is the corresponding author. Co-authors include researchers from the Aerospace Information Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and other domestic and international institutions. The research was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province, and other projects.

Full text link: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-5543-2025

Data link: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17128483

Written by Du Zhenrong