Abstract
Livestock heat stress threatens production, particularly in semi-arid, arid and tropical regions. Using established temperature thresholds for sheep, we modelled +1 °C and +3 °C temperature increases over the historical baseline, estimating that 2.1 million potential lambs are lost annually due to heat stress alone, increasing to 2.5 and 3.3 million, respectively, as temperatures rise. Heat stress poses risks at key periods of the reproductive cycle, with consequences across the Australian sheep flock.
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Data availability
The Australian Gridded Climate Data used to generate the climate scenarios are available at the Bureau of Meteorology website: http://www.bom.gov.au/metadata/catalogue/19115/ANZCW0503900567. Sheep population data are available in Supplementary Information. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
Funding was provided by Meat and Livestock Australia (project number: L.LSM.0024) to W.H.E.J.v.W., D.O.K., P.H. and S.W. The funders had no role in data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.
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W.H.E.J.v.W., S.C., A.M.F.S., S.T.L., S.J.L., A.C.W., J.M.K., S.J.W., D.O.K., D.S.T., P.T.H., K.L.G., K.L.K. and S.W. designed the study. W.H.E.J.v.W., S.C., A.M.F.S., S.T.L., S.J.L., D.S.T., P.T.H., S.W., A.C.W. and D.O.K. conducted the data analysis and contributed to the modelling. W.H.E.J.v.W. wrote the first draft. W.H.E.J.v.W., S.C., A.M.F.S., S.T.L., S.J.L., A.C.W., J.M.K., S.J.W., D.O.K., K.L.G., K.L.K., P.T.H. and S.W. critically revised the paper. The corresponding author attests that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and that no authors meeting the criteria have been omitted.
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Nature Food thanks Geoffrey Dahl, Dianne Mayberry, Veerasamy Sejian and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Source Data Fig. 1
Folder containing three sub-folders for each panel and three sub-folders within each panel sub-folder (one for each climate scenario).
Source Data Fig. 2
Source data.
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Van Wettere, W.H.E.J., Culley, S., Swinbourne, A.M.F. et al. Heat stress from current and predicted increases in temperature impairs lambing rates and birth weights in the Australian sheep flock. Nat Food 5, 206–210 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-00935-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-024-00935-w
