by Vanessa Meadu
New data on global livestock distribution to help sector along sustainable pathways
Today, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), in collaboration with the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and other partners, releases a new, 10 km global dataset of livestock distributions: the Gridded Livestock of the World, version 3.0 (GLW3), published in Nature Scientific Data.
GLW3 has a reference year of 2010 and includes global distributions of cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats, horses, pigs, chickens and ducks at a spatial resolution of 5 minutes of arc.
The digital maps in geotiff format are freely available for download via FAO’s Livestock Systems website, which also provides data on production systems and links to resources related to sustainable livestock sector development.
Timothy Robinson, Livestock Policy Officer at the FAO, who co-led GLW3, answers a few questions about this new data.
Q: Why map livestock? Read more →