Estimating livestock biomass across diverse populations and data ecosystems

Estimates of livestock biomass can be used as denominators in disease burden estimates, in addition to informing assessments of resource use and environmental impacts. This article explores the challenges of accurately estimating biomass across different scales and data ecosystems, with a particular focus on the use of biomass in the Global Burden of Animal Diseases programme. The greatest of these challenges is a lack of subgroup (breed, age, sex)-specific data on populations and liveweights at national and subnational level. This can be overcome by using global datasets and generic estimates of liveweight for each species, though this approach fails to account for the diversity of livestock systems.