Ziga Malek
Ziga Malek is a landscape scientist interested in combining statistical and in-situ data on land use with earth observation products to map the way we use our terrestrial surface beyond what we can observe with satellites. This way, he has mapped the spatial distribution of organic farmers worldwide, land-use decision making and grazing in seminatural areas in Europe. In addition, he has developed land use models - many of which used data derived from earth observation - all across the globe and on different scales. Ziga has obtained his engineers degree at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and his PhD at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Sessions
Improving the sustainability of the European livestock sector requires high resolution spatial data. Otherwise potential negative impacts of livestock related to local ecosystem degradation, as well as positive ones such as preserving cultural landscapes through grazing cannot be analysed. Data on livestock numbers usually used in scientific analyses are collected and provided by the European statistical office, but are provided on a rather coarse spatial resolution of statistical regions. In addition, data on the actual use of grasslands, whether grazed, mown and the intensity of their use is not collected systematically or not at all. We provide an approach for mapping grazing livestock (cattle, small ruminants) density and the use of grassland for Europe. We first collected livestock numbers on a local level for all EU countries, which we harmonized, and supplemented it with statistics on actual outdoor grazing of animals. We then mapped areas that are grazed by combining EU-wide in-situ data on grazing with a set of socio-economic, terrain, soil and climate characteristics using machine learning. We then allocated grazing livestock on two different earth observation derived land use and land cover products: corine land cover and the high resolution grassland layer. Our approach enables identifying areas that are grazed, and combined with livestock statistics, also how intensively these areas are used either for grazing or mowing. Such information can support tracking the state of european grassland ecosystems, landscape conservation, as well as other environmental dimensions related to the livestock sector, such as nitrogen deposition, with a high spatial detail. Finally, by using regularly updated systematically collected data, we can update the data in the future.