High-resolution maps of intensive and extensive livestock production in China

Reliable and detailed information on livestock distribution is essential for studies of food security, environmental change, and even sustainable development. However, insufficient accuracy and inadequate validation currently remain in high-resolution livestock distribution datasets primarily resulting from using spatially-continuous models and deficient data. This study presents, for the first time to our knowledge, a spatially detailed dataset on intensive (point) and extensive (30”× 30” grid) livestock production in China (HIEL-China) in 2017 based on an improved model and multi-scale data. Technical validation shows the high accuracy in spatial distribution and farm-size simulation. Based on the more reliable depiction of livestock farms, we addressed the obvious underestimation of livestock density in previous datasets, and found a concentric structure of livestock distribution in urban, peri-urban and rural areas. This study accordingly contributes to an essential data basis for livestock-associated analyses targeting at sustainable development of food systems, especially for the largest contributor to global food production.