Impact of Climate Change on Animal Welfare, Health, and/or Product Quality of Livestock Species
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Welfare".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 May 2025 | Viewed by 491
Special Issue Editor
Interests: animal welfare; pigs; stress; handling; transport; slaughter; meat quality
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Climate change, with predicted temperatures increasing by up to 3 °C more by 2050, has complex impacts on livestock production systems, challenging animals’ thermoregulatory mechanism, among other factors.
During production and marketing processes, environmental conditions exceeding the upper critical temperature of the thermal comfort zone result in severe heat stress, thereby affecting the welfare condition of livestock and their productivity. Ensuring the thermal comfort zone is respected during an animal’s life can help improve its performance and curb losses, due to poor health, death, non-ambulatory condition, clinical signs of deterioration, carcass condemnations, and product quality defects.
This Special Issue welcomes original research articles and reviews showing evidence of the effects of heat stress on performance, losses, animal-welfare-based indicators, and/or the product quality of livestock species throughout the production phases (from farm to slaughter, including transport). It also welcomes research validating the efficiency of mitigating strategies to ensure animal thermal needs at met under warmer environmental conditions, with the objective to improve the sustainability of the livestock production sector.
I look forward to receiving insightful contributions.
Dr. Luigi Faucitano
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- animal welfare
- climate
- heat stress
- livestock
- productivity
- product quality
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