Sustainability 2026, 18(17), 8858; https://doi.org/10.3390/su18178858 - 28 Aug 2026
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Extensive small-ruminant grazing sustains food production on the Mediterranean land with few alternative uses, yet supervision is intermittent and welfare oversight weak. Digital monitoring is expected to close that gap, but detection alone does not produce intervention. In remote rangelands the link is
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Extensive small-ruminant grazing sustains food production on the Mediterranean land with few alternative uses, yet supervision is intermittent and welfare oversight weak. Digital monitoring is expected to close that gap, but detection alone does not produce intervention. In remote rangelands the link is unreliable, so an inference may reach the farmer late, degraded or not at all, and an alert arriving after the animal has moved is not a weaker alert but a different decision. This study develops a human-in-the-loop decision framework in which the delivery state of the link becomes a decision variable rather than a transport detail, coupling technology, farmer behaviour and governance. Constructed through design science research and structured analysis of an EU-funded project’s specifications and evaluation plans, it comprises a seven-layer architecture, a decision-episode schema, a connectivity-aware alert lifecycle, a decision-provenance matrix, and an evidence-maturity classification constraining what may be claimed. Five decision classes from a Cretan sheep and goat pilot instantiate it. After applying it, specification inconsistencies invisible to component-level review surfaced, among which is an alert payload lacking the coordinates, confidence and severity that its own indicators require. The framework is an instantiated specification, not a validated intervention: no detection, delivery, acknowledgement, usability or sustainability outcome is measured.
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