Impacts of Heat Stress on Animal Welfare and Their Adaptive Management
A Special Issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615) belonging to the section "Animal Welfare".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2027 | Viewed by 9
Editors
Interests: ruminants; oxidative stress; nutrition metabolism; sustainable farming; livestock intensive production and new food alternatives; methane emissions in dairy farms; heat stress in dairy farms; milk production quality
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Thermal stress is an increasing concern for animal welfare across managed species. Its effects depend not only on environmental conditions but also on species-specific thermoregulatory capacity, physiological status, housing, management, and access to resources that facilitate heat dissipation.
This Special Issue will address the mechanisms, detection, and welfare consequences of thermal stress in livestock, horses, companion animals, shelter animals, and other less-studied species. We will pay particular attention to early and subclinical responses that precede overt clinical signs, productivity losses, or marked welfare impairment.
We welcome original research articles and reviews on physiological and blood biomarkers, behavioral indicators, thermal resilience, individual variability, chronic or repeated heat exposure, and species-specific thermoregulatory responses. Studies examining the effects of physiological status, age, genotype, health, housing, ventilation, stocking density, shade, and water availability are also encouraged.
Further topics include precision monitoring, wearable sensors, computer vision, infrared thermography, and continuous environmental recording. Contributions integrating physiological, behavioral, environmental, and management data to develop species- and system-specific thermal risk models and preventive or mitigation strategies are particularly welcome.
We look forward to receiving contributions addressing thermal stress under experimental and real-world conditions across different production, housing, transport, shelter, sport, and household management contexts worldwide.
Prof. Dr. Cristina Castillo Rodríguez
Dr. Elena Niceas Martinez
Guest Editors
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 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
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
- thermal stress
- animal welfare
- heat stress
- thermoregulation
- biomarkers
- behavioral indicators
- thermal resilience
- precision livestock farming
- risk assessment
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