Understanding Animals' Phenotype through Automatic Behavior Assessment

About this Research Topic

Background

Behavior in farm animals is an elastic trait that changes according to environmental circumstances and intrinsic properties. For instance, behavior will be the first trait to change when adapting to new housing or management. It may also change once the health status of an animal is threatened.

Precision Livestock Farming has come to stay. Sensor technologies are changing the way farm animals are reared, as they offer an enormous potential to understand how animals behave and react to their environment. This provides an unprecedented potential to refine management and breeding in farm animals.

Current technical capacity allows a precise monitoring of animal behavior, including feeding, social and play behavior and activity, from which many other activities can be predicted. This Research Topic will include research and review papers that address the assessment of animal behavior using methodologies capable of performing it in an automatic and systematic manner, mainly (but not exclusively) through precision livestock farming tools. This collection is also interested in manuscripts unraveling the physiological aspects which modulate behavior using modern sensing technology.

Contributions addressing either applied or fundamental research questions are welcomed, given that model species are farm animals (both terrestrial and aquatic species).

Image courtesy of SRUC Kirkton

Keywords: Animal behaviour, Imaging, Livestock, Phenotype, Pigs, Poultry, Precision Livestock Farming, Sensors, Systematic assessment

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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