PLEASE NOTE: THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED UNTIL AUGUST 31, 2020.

Climate change has been one of biggest environmental stressors challenging global animal industry as it adversely affects performance and health of the animals, particularly chicken. It is because chickens are vulnerable to heat stress and they could only tolerate narrow range of temperature. Although the topic of climate change has been long history in global chicken industry, fundamental studies on heat stress are lacking. Thus, we do not know the overall aspect of how heat stress will affect the nutrition and physiology of the chickens and of how it will interact with nutrition and environment factors in a negative or positive manner. Recently, interaction of heat stress with coccidiosis or necrotic enteritis, which are listed as top enteric diseases in poultry industry, has been has been proposed. From an animal welfare point of view, stress response due to heat stress during the growing phase of production and potential preventive measures are to be controlled and to be implemented to satisfy the consumers' demand for stress-free meats. In that sense, it is time to answer on what has been accomplished so far and what research directions should we take to deal with heat stress in chicken industry.

The aim of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Veterinary Science is to answer the important following questions for sustainable poultry production:

1) How heat stress per se impacts chickens?
2) What are the consequences of heat stress in chicken?
3) What are the factors triggering effects of heat stress? and
4) What strategies should we employ to prevent heat stress?

Review articles, research papers and technical notes reporting an update on impact of heat stress on chickens are encouraged.

In particular, we would like to focus on following areas: growth, physiological and immunological response of chickens to heat stress; nutritional or environmental factors including coccidiosis and/or necrotic enteritis triggering or interacting with heat stress in chickens; and nutritional or environmental strategies to mitigate heat stress in chickens.

Submit your idea

Impact

Frontiers in Veterinary Science

Participating Journals

Impact