Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model (GLEAM-X).
gleam: The GLEAM R Package
The official R package of the FAO's Global Livestock Environmental Assessment Model (GLEAM).
This package provides a modular implementation of GLEAM to quantify environmental impacts from livestock agrifood systems. The model simulates herd dynamics and quantifies key metrics, including animal-sourced food production, energy requirements and feed intake, nitrogen balance, and greenhouse gas emissions from enteric fermentation, manure management, and upstream feed production. The package also allocates estimated emissions to major animal products and services.
Purpose
This package supports the sustainable transformation of livestock systems by enabling evidence-based decision-making through a transparent and reproducible modeling framework.
The official GLEAM workflow allows users to:
- Simulate steady-state herd dynamics to disaggregate animal herds into age and sex-specific cohorts
- Compute annual production of animal products and herd growth rate
- Estimate animal energy requirements for maintenance, activity, growth, lactation, pregnancy, work, eggs, and fiber production
- Compute nutritional contributions of user-defined feed rations per cohort
- Estimate dry matter intake and nitrogen balance
- Estimate methane (CH~4~) emissions from enteric fermentation
- Estimate CH~4~ and nitrous oxide (N~2~O) emissions from manure management
- Estimate carbon dioxide (CO~2~), CH~4~, and N~2~O emission related to the production, processing and transport of feed
- Allocate estimated emissions to major animal products and services
Model Coverage
The model currently considers cattle, buffalo, camels, goats, pigs, and sheep.
Installation
To install the development version of the package:
# If devtools is not installed
install.packages("devtools")
# Install from GitHub
devtools::install_git("https://github.com/un-fao/GLEAM.git")
Help & Contact
We kindly ask users to inform us of your usage, as this helps us track the tool’s impact and guide future improvements. Please also get in touch with the GLEAM development team for documentation, internal guidance, or technical questions.
License
This package is licensed under the AGPL-3 license which permits free use, modification, and sharing of the software. Under AGPL-3.0, any modifications to the code must be made publicly available by creating a new branch on GitHub. The software cannot be relicensed under more restrictive terms without adhering to the AGPL-3.0 guidelines. Developers may anonymize or remove any sensitive or identifiable data (customizations) before resubmitting code.
Acknowledgement
The development of the GLEAM ecosystem was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture, and Regional Identity BMELH.