<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="data-paper" specific-use="SMUR" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2025-256</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A high-resolution gridded dataset of livestock distribution on the Mongolian Plateau (2000&amp;ndash;2020)</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Liu</surname>
<given-names>Yaping</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Wang</surname>
<given-names>Juanle</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ochir</surname>
<given-names>Altansukh</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff5">
<sup>5</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zou</surname>
<given-names>Weihao</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>State Key Laboratory of Resources and Environmental Information System, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural  Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>College of Geoscience and Surveying Engineering, China University of Mining &amp; Technology (Beijing), Beijing 100083,  China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>Jiangsu Center for Collaborative Innovation in Geographical Information Resource Development and Application, Nanjing 210023, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff5">
<label>5</label>
<addr-line>Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Department of Environment and Forest Engineering, School of Engineering and  Applied Sciences and Institute for Sustainable Development, National University of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar 14201</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>20</day>
<month>05</month>
<year>2025</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2025</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>29</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2025 Yaping Liu et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2025</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-256/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-256/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-256/essd-2025-256.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-256/essd-2025-256.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Accurate quantification of the geospatial distribution of livestock in pastoral regions is important for assessing and maintaining grassland ecological security and sustainable development. Statistical livestock data based on static and macro-level administrative units cannot characterize the fine-scale distribution of livestock across mobile geographic spaces. This study proposed a livestock spatial mapping framework that combined livestock inventory statistics of soum/banner counties with multi-source data (e.g., land cover, population, topography, and climate, etc.) using the Random Forest model (RF). A series of high-resolution gridded spatial distribution datasets of total livestock, sheep &amp;amp; goats, and large livestock (cattle, horses, and camels) densities at five-year intervals were obtained for the Mongolian Plateau from 2000 to 2020. The fitting accuracy of this dataset with statistical data (R&amp;sup2;&amp;gt;0.85) is significantly better than that of the existing Gridded Livestock of the World (GLW) series dataset, and the spatial distribution is more accurate and detailed. At the same time, it also compensates for the lack of spatial information of large livestock such as camels in the GLW. This approach enables coarse-grained administrative division data transforming into high-resolution spatial gridded data, by solving the key problems of low spatial resolution, missing local details, and the spatial fusion of different data sources. Based on the acquired high-precision spatial distribution data of livestock density, it can be fused and analyzed with other geographic environment data, which is of great value for the ecological environment protection of grassland in nomadic grassland areas. Gridded livestock density datasets are freely available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28695728&quot; target=&quot;_blank&quot; rel=&quot;noopener&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28695728&lt;/a&gt; (Liu and Wang, 2025).</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="29"/></counts>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>