Kieron Moller is a Master's student at Michigan State University in Biosystems and Agriculture; Engineering working in the Digital Tools, Geospatial and Farming Systems Consortium, funded by The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Collaborative Research on Sustainable Intensification (SIIL). Currently, he is investigating the challenges that livestock farming in Bangladesh is facing.
In this way, Kieron explained that this project is looking at livestock farming in Bangladesh, so we are interested in the challenges that the Bangladesh livestock sector faces and the potential solutions to these problems.
According to Kieron's investigation, Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change due to low elevation and rising sea levels. This country has suffered from flooding, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, earthquakes, tidal surges, poor veterinary care, lack of technical expertise, breeding, management practices, and COVID-19. As a consequence of these natural disasters and other challenges, livestock production has been affected.
Kieron did a comprehensive literature review to carry out this research by looking through different resources, such as reports, studies, and digital maps. One big challenge for him was to find enough relevant literature within the last fifteen years.
Kieron also highlighted that in Bangladesh, about 50% of the population gets some income from the livestock industry, and many of them are related to livestock production. Using different geospatial techniques, Kieron was able to create several livestock maps to describe its distribution and variabilities as influenced by different physiographical and climatological characteristics. These products include distribution, cluster and outlier analysis, hot spot, and multivariate regression with agricultural information obtained from the government of Bangladesh.
Kieron’s research compiles different areas from climate change to COVID-19 and looks for potential solutions to help and improve the decision-making that affects people’s lives. He considered the maps would help people figure out which regions to target with specific intervention methods.
To conclude, Kieron said, "I hope that by publishing this, it would improve at least one person's life. But I hope it helps more people. I enjoy helping other people as much as I can".