Global Pasture Watch - Livestock reference samples based on multi-source sub-national census data (2000—2024)

Harmonized collection from various international/national agencies and existing livestock data sources. Data were downloaded, curated and standardized using an ontology framework, and later integrated with existing livestock polygonal data. The data for each administrative area polygon includes: unique id, unit name, reference year,  livestock specie, and annual headcount estimates.

The harmonized GPKG file contains information for cattle, horses, goats, sheep and buffaloes and it is composed by:

• GPW: Time series of livestock census data obtained from various national agencies organized by Global Pasture Watch project.
• GLW: Subset of the input census polygons used for producing Gridded Livestock of the World v4 (Wisser & Cinardi, 2024)
• Malek et al. (2024): European census data of cattle and sheep counts for 2020 and 2010

Processing pipeline was based on arealDB, ontologics, tabshiftr, Pandas and GeoPandas, and it is publicly available in https://github.com/wri/global-pasture-watch.

Related resources

• Maps of livestock headcount for 2000—2022 (FAOSTAT-adjusted):
  All animals (Part-1)  All animals (Part-2)
• Maps of livestock density for 2000—2022 (including 95% prediction interval):
  Cattle  Goats   Sheep  Horses Buffaloes
• Livestock reference census data (2000–2022):
  CSV and GeoPackage files
• Maps potential land for livestock production for 2000—2022 (including production systems)
  Raster files
• Data catalogues:
  OpenLandMap STAC Google Earth Engine