Ruizhen WANG

My internship is focused on the construction of a model of animal production at the regional-landscape scale starting from livestock diet, in terms of quantity and quality. The model will be the embedded in an existing model of nitrogen fluxes and agricultural production (crops and livestock) at the regional scale. At a qualitative level, the internship will be focused also on the bibliographic research of the impacts of diet composition on animal welfare and production quality (according to both consumer preferences and nutritional criteria). Starting from this information some scenarios will be developed for simulating the impact of different diets on a set of indicators at the regional scale, such as animal production, feed-food competition, feed import needs, methane emissions from ruminant enteric fermentation, and (qualitatively) on animal welfare and milk and meat quality.