Extensive livestock farming movement under climate change

Climate change is expected to alter resource availability, vegetation dynamics, and environmental conditions across Mediterranean ecosystems, with potentially important consequences for agriculture, and particularly for extensive livestock systems. Understanding how environmental conditions influence livestock movement in their occupied ecosystems is therefore essential for predicting the responses of grazing systems to increasing climatic variability and extreme events. We investigated the effects of climate and productivity, land use, and topography on the spatial behaviour of extensive cattle and sheep, at two temporal scales, across the Iberian Peninsula, one of Europe’s most climate-vulnerable Mediterranean regions. We collected GPS data between 2018 and 2024 (total of 16,474,709 locations) from 263 cattle and 702 sheep herds distributed across different climatic conditions (Arid, Temperate and Cold regions). These herds occupied 45.7% of the peninsular territory (2.7x10⁵ km²), distributed throughout 40 Spanish and 3 Portuguese provinces/districts. We estimated annual home range size and daily travelled distance of tracked herds. Generalized linear mixed models and variation partitioning analyses were used to identify the main environmental drivers of livestock movement. Our results indicate that environmental drivers differed markedly between temporal scales. At the annual scale, climate and grassland productivity emerged as the dominant drivers of home range size, explaining the largest unique fraction of variation in both cattle (31.8%) and sheep (24.0%). Home ranges generally decreased as rainfall increases and more productive conditions, indicating that greater resource availability reduces the need for extensive movements. These results suggest that future shifts in precipitation regimes, drought frequency, and vegetation productivity may substantially modify livestock space use. Land-use effects were comparatively weaker, although managed pastures consistently reduced home range requirements. At the daily scale, topography was the main determinant of movement distances, explaining the largest proportion of variation in both cattle (16.1%) and sheep (9.8%). Nevertheless, climatic variables also showed significant non-linear effects, with precipitation and temperature influencing daily displacements in both livestock species. Accumulated rainfall during the previous month was negatively associated with daily movement distances, highlighting the importance of short-term environmental conditions and forage availability. Artificial land cover increased daily movement, whereas agricultural areas generally reduced it. Our findings reveal that extensive livestock movement is highly sensitive to climatic and productivity gradients, particularly at broader spatial scales. In Mediterranean regions, where climate change is expected to intensify droughts and alter vegetation phenology, these responses may reshape grazing patterns, resource use, and ecosystem functioning. By linking large-scale livestock tracking data with environmental drivers, this study provides new evidence of how climate change may affect both agricultural systems and the ecological processes mediated by domestic herbivores, supporting the development of adaptive management strategies for Mediterranean landscapes.