Animal digital twins: systems architecture for climate-smart protein production

Animal digital twins couple sensor observations and farm records with process-based, data-driven or hybrid models to maintain continuously updated representations of animal state and management outcomes. Using ruminant methane as the principal illustration, this Perspective presents a nested architecture spanning animal, farm, supply chain and governance layers, and proposes six actions for climate-smart deployment. Credibility depends on ground-truth calibration, uncertainty-aware verification, farmer control and designs matched to local infrastructure.