Disease & heat resistance

The European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare: Reinforcement of animal resilience (SOA16)

---

Abstract

Livestock populations are constantly exposed to a variety of biotic and abiotic stressors, which can have significant welfare and socioeconomic impacts. Stress-resilient animals represent an ideal solution to managing disease threats provided that this can be achieved without compromising economic efficiency. In highly selected breeds and in local populations, there is an increased necessity to include functional traits in multi-performance breeding that take animal well-being and environmental issues into account. Resilience is a key trait, but challenging to include this trait in a breeding program because of the difficulty of phenotyping this complex trait and achieving sufficiently precise genetic evaluations of it. The European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare (EUPAHW) (https://eupahw.eu) funded the SOA16 research project, whose main goal is to develop the necessary knowledge and tools to integrate resilience traits in selective breeding and develop true integrated animal health management systems and interventions. To achieve this, the specific goals being worked on are to: 1) identify resilience indicators and their relation with health, welfare and production traits 2) decipher the effects and interactions of genetics, feeding and management practices on resilience and health traits 3) develop new models to improve resilience and health at the population level, and - to assess the potential of these new tools in breeding. SOA16 consists of six major tasks: - Task 1 aims at establishing a network of experts, relevant for this action; - Task 2 defines and measures resilience indicator traits based on integration and modelling big data produced in the partnership; - Task 3 studies the (combined) effects of genetics, feeding & management practices on resilience/health/welfare traits; - Task 4 studies trade-offs between resilience and production traits, paving the way for defining economic values for resilience indicators in selection indices; - Task 5 integrates genetic and epidemiology by developing new predictive models for more resilient animals at the population level; - Task 6 assesses the potential of including resilience in breeding goals to improve animal health and welfare, within an integrated animal health strategy. In the context of the project, environments can be characterised by both their average quality (harshness) and their variability. Likewise, there is increasing evidence that animal robustness in production-the ability to maintain its functionality under a wide range of conditions and stresses without substantial change-and resilience-the ability to cope with short-term disturbances, including those caused by pathogens, through response and rapid recovery to its original state-are different traits. SOA16 explores environmental disturbances that challenge both resilience and robustness, aiming to better understand the underlying mechanisms that are shared by both.

Keywords: 2026

How to Cite:

Ballester, M., Bergmann, H., Crisà , A., Ellen, E., Friggens, N., Frutos, P., Gesto, M., Klingström, T., Lo Iacono, G., Parois, S., Pegolo, S., Petrucci, D., Pinard-van Der Laan, M., Smith, R., Suárez-Vega, A., Topolski, P. & Wimmers, K., (2026) “The European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare: Reinforcement of animal resilience (SOA16)”, World Congress on Genetics Applied to Livestock Production Digital Archive 2026(1): 2283093. doi: https://doi.org/10.31274/wcgalp.23481

Rights: 1