Mapping the geography of livestock systems in South America’s dry diagonal
利用疫苗接种、登记和交易等空间数据集，通过主动学习和决策树方法，在南美干旱对角线地区识别并绘制了11种畜牧系统，揭示了不同系统的空间分布及其与社会生态条件的关系，为可持续规划提供依据。
• Identified and mapped eleven livestock systems across South America’s Dry Diagonal. • Evidence of adaptive capacity yet marginalization of pastoralists and smallholders. • Capitalized ranching dominates the productive regions of the Cerrado and Chaco. • Replicable method to map diverse livestock systems using untapped datasets. Livestock production is a major driver of global environmental change, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss, primarily through the conversion of tropical forests to pasture. Yet, livestock occur in diverse production systems, each with unique impacts depending on the social-ecological context in which they are embedded. While understanding the spatial distribution of different livestock systems is crucial for sustainability planning, this geography remains unmapped for many regions, leaving policymakers and researchers with a critical data gap. Here, we use largely untapped spatial datasets on livestock, including vaccination, registers, and transaction data, and apply active learning and decision trees to classify and map major livestock systems at scale. We demonstrate our approach for the 4.2 million km 2 Dry Diagonal covering the Caatinga, Cerrado, Chiquitano, and Chaco ecoregions across parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, which are global hotspots for livestock production and deforestation. Three main findings emerge. First, we identified eleven distinct livestock systems across the South American Dry Diagonal, encompassing pastoralists, small-scale, and capitalized systems. Second, analysing the spatial determinants of these livestock systems revealed small-scale and pastoralist systems’ association with arid, less productive areas, highlighting their adaptive capacity as well as marginalization. Third, mapping livestock systems revealed a clear spatial segregation of production models: large-scale, capitalized systems dominate the Cerrado and Humid Chaco, while small-scale and pastoralist systems are concentrated in the more arid Dry Chaco and Caatinga. This reflects historical land-use patterns, institutional factors, and local social-ecological conditions. Together, the diverse patterns of livestock production we uncover highlight the need for targeted, context-sensitive land and livestock management strategies in tropical dry woodlands.