Review: Domestic herbivores and food security: current contribution, trends and challenges for a sustainable development.

Herbivores are found in a variety of ecosystems all over the world. Permanent pastures and meadows cover about 25% of global land. We currently count one domesticated herbivore for two people in the world and the number is growing.

An exploratory analysis on how geographic, socioeconomic, and environmental drivers affect the diversity of livestock breeds worldwide.

This study investigates the relationships between various environmental and geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic factors with the diversity of livestock breeds reported within countries across the world. Statistical analyses were performed considering the numbers of breeds reported by 158 countries for 4 livestock mammalian species (cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs). Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries reported more breeds than non-OECD countries in general.

Environmental impacts of beef production: Review of challenges and perspectives for durability.

Beef makes a substantial contribution to food security, providing protein, energy and also essential micro-nutrients to human populations. Rumination allows cattle - and other ruminant species - to digest fibrous feeds that cannot be directly consumed by humans and thus to make a net positive contribution to food balances. This contribution is of particular importance in marginal areas, where agro-ecological conditions and weak infrastructures do not offer much alternative.

The response of farmland bird communities to agricultural intensity as influenced by its spatial aggregation.

The shape of the relationship between biodiversity and agricultural intensity determines the range of intensities that should be targeted by conservation policies to obtain the greatest environmental benefits. Although preliminary evidence of this relationship exists, the influence of the spatial arrangement of intensity on biodiversity remains untested. We conducted a nationwide study linking agricultural intensity and its spatial arrangement to a farmland bird community of 22 species.

Trade-offs between pasture production and farmland bird conservation: exploration of options using a dynamic farm model.

In European grassland landscapes, grazing and mowing play a key role for the maintenance of high-quality habitats that host important bird populations. As grasslands are also key resources for cattle feeding, there is a need to develop management strategies that achieve the double objective of production and biodiversity conservation. The objective of this study was to use a modelling approach to generate recognisable patterns of bird dynamics in farms composed of different land use proportions, and to compare their production and ecological dimensions.