Mapping the Global Distribution of Livestock

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0096084

10.1371-journal.pone.0096084.PDF

Figure 2 shows the global distributions of cattle, pigs and chickens and the partial distribution of ducks respectively; created by merging the results from the continental tiles for each species. These global maps represent the predicted data, first corrected to match the polygon values of the observed data and then to match the FAOSTAT country values in 2006. The highest cattle densities (Figure 2a) are found in India, in the East African highlands (particularly in Ethiopia), in Northern Europe and in South America. Desert areas and the tropical rain forests of Amazonia and of the Congo Basin have practically no cattle. The highest concentrations of pigs are found in China and in other Eastern Pacific countries (Figure 2b). Pigs are also densely distributed in European countries while only a few countries in Africa (e.g. Uganda, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo) have significant densities. Relatively high concentrations are also found in Central America and in Brazil. The distribution of chickens (Figure 2c) closely follows that of the human population. The highest concentrations are found in eastern China, in Pakistan and India, and in western Europe. In Africa, the countries facing the Gulf of Guinea and Madagascar also have high chicken densities. The densely populated east coast of the United States also shows high numbers whilst chickens are only sparsely distributed in the central and western states. The heavily populated areas of southern Brazil also show high concentrations of chickens. The distribution of ducks (Figure 2d), for those regions for which sub-national statistics were available, adds information to previous national and regional duck mapping efforts [18], [19]. Ducks are far less common than chickens worldwide although high densities are to be found in South-East Asia and China where duck production is often integrated with rice cropping and fish farming [56]–[57]. Though to a lesser extent, duck densities are also quite high in a few European countries (e.g. France). file S4 provides a summary of the sub-national statistics used for the modelling and file S5 provides detailed metadata for the sub-national statistics used to develop the livestock distribution models. file S6 provides two graphic summaries of data availability for the modelled species (a) the average spatial resolution of the training data and (b) administrative level of the training data.

10.1371-journal.pone.0096084.PDF

1.3MB