0000000000084732
AUTHOR
Carlos Fernández
Qualitative Analysis of Feed Management Practice on Goat Herds by Self Organizing Maps in Murcia Region of Spain
Abstract Fernandez, C., Soria, E., Magdalena, R., Martin, J.D. and Mata, C. 2007. Qualitative analysis of feed management practice on goat herds by self organizing maps in Murcia region of Spain. J. Appl. Anim. Res., 32: 41–47. Self organizing maps (SOM) were used to analyze data from ninety four herds. Data were obtained from surveys and management practices were evaluated. The 18% of farms were dairy goat farms with milking machines, with a herd size of 100 to 200 goats and most of these bought compound feed. 12% has the same characteristics but farmers prepared their own diet. 16% were similar to previous prototypes, but farmers in addition to dairy goat production kept sheep as well. 23…
Decoding Group Vocalizations: The Acoustic Energy Distribution of Chorus Howls Is Useful to Determine Wolf Reproduction
Population monitoring is crucial for wildlife management and conservation. In the last few decades, wildlife researchers have increasingly applied bioacoustics tools to obtain information on several essential ecological parameters, such as distribution and abundance. One such application involves wolves (Canis lupus). These canids respond to simulated howls by emitting group vocalizations known as chorus howls. These responses to simulated howls reveal the presence of wolf litters during the breeding period and are therefore often used to determine the status of wolf populations. However, the acoustic structure of chorus howls is complex and discriminating the presence of pups in a chorus i…
Effect of lemon leaves on energy and C–N balances, methane emission, and milk performance in Murciano-Granadina dairy goats
[EN] The objective of this experiment was to find out the effect of lemon leaves on energy and C-N balances, methane emission, and milk performance in dairy goats. Lemon leaves were used to replace alfalfa as forage in a diet for Murciano-Granadina goats. Ten Murciano-Granadina dairy goats (44.1 +/- 4.47 kg of BW) in late lactation (185 +/- 7.2 d) were selected in a crossover design experiment, where each goat received 2 treatments in 2 periods. One group was fed a mixed ration with 450 g of pelleted alfalfa per kilogram of DM (ALF diet) and, the other group replaced alfalfa with 450 g of pelleted lemon leaves per kilogram DM (LEM diet). The concentrate was pelleted, being the same for the …
Qualitative analysis of goat and sheep production data using self-organizing maps
The aim of this study was to analyse the relationship between different small ruminant livestock production systems with different levels of specialization. The analysis is carried out by using the self-organizing map. This tool allows high-dimensional input spaces to be mapped into much lower-dimensional spaces, thus making it much more straightforward to understand any set of data. These representations enable the visual extraction of qualitative relationships among variables (visual data mining), converting the data to maps. The data used in this study were obtained from surveys completed by farmers who are principally dedicated to goat and sheep production. With the self-organizing map …
Neural networks for animal science applications: Two case studies
Abstract Artificial neural networks have shown to be a powerful tool for system modelling in a wide range of applications. In this paper, we focus on neural network applications to intelligent data analysis in the field of animal science. Two classical applications of neural networks are proposed: time series prediction and clustering. The first task is related to the prediction of weekly milk production in goat flocks, which includes a knowledge discovery stage in order to analyse the relative relevance of the different variables. The second task is the clustering of goat flocks; it is used to analyse different livestock surveys by using self-organizing maps and the adaptive resonance theo…