Sensors for Animal Health Monitoring and Precision Livestock Farming—2nd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

The global population is predicted to increase to 9 billion by 2050. Combined with climate change and pressure on available land, this is placing increasing demands on the agricultural sector to produce high-quality foods efficiently to feed the growing population with minimal environmental footprint. In the dairy sector, the average farm size has grown as farms have combined and consolidated to reap the benefit of scale. While this can be beneficial, increases in farm size mean that farmers have less time to undertake essential routine tasks traditionally carried out by visually observing their herds. Technology has played a key supporting role in this context, enabling farmers to monitor cattle 24 hours per day to monitor herd fertility, health, positive welfare and environmental impact.

Owing to the success of the first volume, this second volume concentrates on non-invasive, non-contact sensing solutions such as video, audio, radar, photonics, etc. This Special Issue will contribute to the state of the art and present precision farming solutions and applications enabled by monitoring technologies within animal welfare and environmental monitoring. The Guest Editors invite papers related to the following topics:

• Localisation and tracking of animals;
• Technologies that aid the quantification of greenhouse gases;
• Machine learning and data processing in agriculture;
• Image processing and computer vision;
• Detection of animal behaviour;
• Measurement of parameters that relate to animal welfare;
• Technologies that optimise production;
• Algorithms and data analytics that relate to any of the above.

Dr. Christos Tachtatzis
Prof. Dr. Craig Michie
Prof. Dr. Ivan Andonovic
Dr. Holly Ferguson
Prof. Dr. Carol-Anne Duthie
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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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-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sensors 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 2600 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.

• computer vision
• radar
• audio
• photonics
• animal welfare
• activity monitoring
• greenhouse gases
• production efficiency
• feed additives
• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• data analytics