IoT herd monitoring: an opportunity facing the Iberian mountain challenges

Abstract

Abstract Pastoralism is essential for conserving the Iberian mountain landscapes, mainly through the itinerant grazing of herds of hundreds of goats and sheep. The new IoT technologies applied in this first approach are promising for a new paradigm of this management. We present the results obtained by GNSS devices on herds of goats and sheep in the central mountains of Portugal during the last year's grazing cycle, 2022. The locations of hundreds of daily grazing itineraries resulted in images showing the grazing pressure on the territory. Principal component analysis of these images highlights the primary role of the shepherd in selecting the journey zone and the animals remaining in preferred spots. The sequence of these components seems to analytically translate the articulation of scales inherent to herding processes previously described by several authors. It integrates scales from the broadest of the herder's initial determination of the grazing area to that of the herd's movement to the most detailed of each animal's food preferences at each site. The decisive role of these essential actors - the shepherds - in the management of Iberian rangelands, demonstrated by IoT technologies, should give confidence to policymakers to promote the value chain of extensive, territorially based small ruminant production over those intensive systems that take us away from the goals of sustainable development.