Can reshaping microbial communities help reduce antibiotic resistance genes in livestock wastewater?
Our study explores how low-dose sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) pretreatment can support microalgal treatment of dairy-farm wastewater. The laboratory findings point to microbial community shifts as an important part of reducing antibiotic resistance gene (ARG) abundance.
The Pasvik valley from the upper room of the 96-Høyden tower, Svanvik, Sør-Varanger. August 2026.
Photo and text copyright © 2026 CM Cordeiro
The Pasvik valley in Sør-Varanger, Finnmark, carries several administrative descriptions at once. It is a watercourse regulated under hydropower concession, a national park with an associated visitor centre, an international boundary between Norway, Finland and the Russian Federation, and an agricultural district supporting a small number of working farms. I spent three days at NIBIO Svanhovd in August 2026. The observation set out below is a modest one, drawn from a short visit and resting largely on material that the valley publishes about itself: much of the work of holding the district together as a coordinated bio-based economy appears to be performed by artefacts that the governance literature does not ordinarily treat as instruments. Interpretation panels, a heritage designation, a national park visitor centre and a farm shop price list are among them.
Research on transboundary environmental governance is conventionally conducted at the scale of the basin or the treaty, and there are sound reasons for the convention, since formal instruments are constituted at those scales. My contention in what follows is that the convention under-describes Pasvik. The arrangements that appear to be doing coordinating work in the valley operate at a considerably finer grain, and a number of them are physical objects placed in the landscape for the instruction of residents and visitors.
Continue reading ”One valley, three states: reading Pasvik as a border bioeconomy”
Photo and text copyright © 2026 CM Cordeiro
In July 2026, Erik Sindhøj and I were invited to join the third and final agricultural-waste training run by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Ezhou, Hubei. Representing NIBIO, the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, we presented on resource recovery from agricultural waste. Together with other international trainers, we helped support some 35 Chinese agri-environment officers as they learnt to become Farmer Field School facilitators, and we contributed a transferable, evidence-first framework for recovering value from manure, straw and mulch film in service of protecting the Yangtze.
The opening slide of our NIBIO session, “Resource Recovery from Agricultural Waste”. The full presentation is available as a PDF: FAO_Resource_Recovery_AgWaste_v0.1 (PDF).
The Jianghan Customs House clock tower, the street’s landmark since the 1920s.
Photo and text copyright © 2026 CM Cordeiro
There may be no better way to understand a region, a country, than to let its doctoral students show you around, first their work, then their favourite haunts. Our day with them began quietly, in a cool molecular-biology corridor where they spend their hours coaxing answers out of the invisible world. From there it spilled outdoors, into an unhurried wander down a hundred-year-old shopping street, and finally gathered, as the best days in Wuhan do, around a steaming tray of crayfish, sleeves pushed up, fingers stained happily red, everyone talking over everyone. What ties those three scenes together is more than good company. It’s a whole food system, quietly on display: the microbes that keep crops and soils healthy, the paddies where this city’s cherished summer catch is raised, and the streets and tables where all of it finally comes home.
We spent the morning at Huazhong Agricultural University (HZAU), one of China’s leading agricultural universities, in the company of the graduate students who work in its National Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology. If that name sounds abstract, the corridor makes it wonderfully concrete: wall after wall of research posters on the microbes that fix nitrogen, fend off crop disease, and turn waste into fertiliser. It is the diligent, invisible workforce underneath every field we had walked through earlier in the trip, and here were the people who spend their days getting to know it.
This review was conducted through an international collaboration involving Tianjin Chengjian University, the Agro-Environmental Protection Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in China, the Dali Observation and Experimental Station of National Agricultural Environment, the Key Laboratory of Low-Carbon Green Agriculture in North China and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.
Antibiotic residues released from livestock and poultry farming are increasingly recognised as an important environmental challenge due to their contribution to water pollution and the spread of antimicrobial resistance. This review examines recent advances in microalgae-based wastewater treatment technologies as sustainable alternatives to conventional physicochemical and biological treatment methods.
Particular emphasis is placed on the role of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS), which function as multifunctional interfaces between microalgae and pollutants. The review synthesises current knowledge on the mechanisms through which EPS contribute to antibiotic removal, including bioadsorption, bioaccumulation, photodegradation, enzymatic biotransformation, and synergistic interactions with bacterial communities. It also evaluates the antibiotic removal performance of different microalgal species and discusses environmental factors influencing treatment efficiency.
Beyond summarising the current state of knowledge, the review identifies important research gaps, including the need for a better understanding of EPS composition and functionality, improved characterisation of antibiotic transformation products, and optimisation of EPS-mediated treatment processes under practical wastewater conditions. These insights provide a roadmap for developing more efficient, sustainable and scalable nature-based solutions for livestock wastewater treatment and circular bioeconomy applications.
Keywords: Microalgae; livestock wastewater; antibiotic removal; extracellular polymeric substances (EPS); bioadsorption; biodegradation; wastewater treatment; circular bioeconomy; nature-based solutions.
Zhang, R., Min, S., Zhi, S., Gong, Y., Liu, K., Cordeiro, C. M., Sindhöj, E., Shen, S., & Zhang, K. (2026). Microalgae-based technology for antibiotic removal from livestock wastewater: A review on mechanisms, performance, and extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) enhancement. Journal of Environmental Management, 412, 130273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2026.130273
This study was conducted through an international collaboration involving Northeast Agricultural University and the Agro-Environmental Protection Institute of China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, together with NIBIO the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, and the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany.
To address the challenges of delayed sample collection, the loss of valid samples, and unstable concentration predictions during the monitoring of ammonia emissions from pig-manure reactor composting, this study developed an in situ online monitoring system integrating photoacoustic spectroscopy and infrared spectroscopy. A multi-indicator iterative outlier-removal method based on logarithmic binning, referred to as Method A, was developed and compared with a conventional single-indicator method using a global threshold, referred to as Method B. Partial least squares regression, random forest, and extremely randomized trees were used to construct quantitative ammonia-concentration prediction models for different concentration bins. Model performance was then systematically assessed using multiple evaluation indicators.
Compared with Method B, Method A increased the sample-retention rate by 22.4% and reduced the loss of dynamic range by 96.2%. During model development, the extremely randomized trees model achieved prediction coefficients of determination ranging from 0.894 to 0.973 across the concentration bins, with residual predictive deviation values of at least 3.0 and mean absolute error as a percentage of full scale ranging from ±2.19% to ±2.68%. Its performance was superior to that of the random forest and partial least squares models.
In subsequent validation, the extremely randomized trees models for the three concentration bins achieved coefficients of determination of 0.908, 0.978, and 0.989, respectively. The corresponding residual predictive deviation values were 3.217, 6.184, and 6.157, while the mean absolute errors as percentages of full scale were ±2.98%, ±3.20%, and ±3.59%, respectively. These results meet the requirements for high-precision quantitative analysis under complex operating conditions.
The findings demonstrate that combining logarithmic binning-based multi-indicator iterative outlier removal with extremely randomized trees enables rapid quantitative prediction of ammonia concentrations. This approach provides technical support for the accurate monitoring of ammonia-emission levels during reactor composting.
Keywords: Pig manure; reactor composting; ammonia; quantitative prediction; infrared spectroscopy; outlier removal; prediction model.
Jia, Y., Yang, Z., Cordeiro, C. M., Sindhöj, E., Siesler, H. W., Qin, W., Zhao, R., & Zhang, K. (2026). 基于红外光谱的猪粪反应器堆肥氨排放浓度速测模型构建 / Development of a rapid ammonia concentration prediction model for pig manure reactor composting based on infrared spectroscopy. 农业环境科学学报 / Journal of Agro-Environment Science. Advance online publication. PDF download.
Seven years after its adoption, and nearly four years after it entered into application, the EU Fertilising Products Regulation (FPR) offers a quiet lesson in how EU regulatory design actually works. The lesson is not about fertilisers alone. It concerns what happens when a harmonised EU framework is placed alongside mature national systems, with producers free to choose between them.
That choice is known, in the language of EU product law, as optional harmonisation. Under the FPR, producers can CE-mark their product and place it on the internal market under EU rules, or they can continue to follow national legislation. Recital 5 of Regulation (EU) 2019/1009 makes this design choice explicit: unlike most Union product harmonisation measures, the FPR does not prevent non-harmonised fertilising products from being placed on the internal market under national law [1]. Compliance with harmonised rules therefore remains optional.
Continue reading ”When optional harmonisation meets a patchwork: what the Fertilising Products Regulation tells us about EU regulatory design”
Image credit: Lachlan Turczan / Google, “Making the Invisible Visible,” Milan Design Week 2025.
A reflection on evaluation frameworks, spillover effects, and what infrastructure economics might teach us about Horizon tools
Horizon Europe represents one of the most substantial public commitments to agricultural research and innovation in the world, funding multi-actor projects, thematic networks, living labs, and knowledge exchange platforms designed to accelerate the transition to more sustainable, productive, and resilient farming systems. Yet as each programme cycle matures, a familiar challenge tends to re-emerge: how do we demonstrate that this investment actually works?
This article draws on ideas from infrastructure economics to reflect on why the challenge remains, suggesting that the issue may lie not in the absence of impact, but perhaps in where and how we choose to look for it.
Current evaluation practice in EU agricultural research tends to focus on what programmes produce: scientific publications, technology prototypes, farmer training events, practice-ready guidelines, policy briefs, and social media outreach. These outputs are visible, countable, and reportable. They satisfy audit requirements and feed neatly into monitoring dashboards. But they tell us surprisingly little about whether research investment actually changes what happens on the ground.
The gap between outputs and outcomes is well recognised in the impact assessment literature. Weiβhuhn et al. (2018) reviewed decades of research impact assessment in agriculture and found that evaluations are systematically skewed toward economic and bibliometric indicators, with environmental and behavioural impacts left substantially underassessed despite being arguably the most policy-relevant outcomes in the current Horizon Europe context. More recently, Faure et al. (2024) tested a multi-dimensional societal impact framework across three agricultural research case studies and found that frameworks assuming simple cause-and-effect attribution consistently underperform compared to approaches grounded in contribution logic and systems thinking. In the Horizon agriculture context, a recent EU CAP Network study covering nearly 1,000 Operational Group projects found that while knowledge co-creation was broadly positive, tracing the pathway from project outputs to farm-level behaviour change remained methodologically elusive (EU CAP Network, 2024). This is not a criticism of the projects themselves; it is a reflection of the evaluative tools available to assess them.
Continue reading ”The Invisible Return: A spillover pathway for EU agricultural research investment”
Text and Photo © 2026 CM Cordeiro
It is not every day that a seminar room fills with the kind of quiet intellectual energy that makes you reach for your notebook before the speaker has even begun. Last week’s gathering at the University of Gothenburg, organised by CERGU (Centre for European Research) and CIBS (Centre for International Business Studies), School of Business, Economics and Law, was one of those occasions.
The guest of honour was Professor Emeritus Naoyuki Yoshino of Keio University, Tokyo, a Johns Hopkins-trained economist whose career spans monetary policy, infrastructure finance, green finance, and most recently, cyber security governance. Professor Yoshino holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, making this visit a homecoming of sorts, and has served as Dean and CEO of the Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI). He is also Economic Adviser to the Republic of Palau.
Text and Photo © 2026 CM Cordeiro
ManuREsource is an international conference dedicated to the exchange of knowledge and experience among researchers, policymakers, industry actors, and farmers on the policy measures, technologies, and valorisation strategies associated with livestock manure management. Organised by the Flemish Coordination Centre for Manure Processing (VCM), Ghent University, and Inagro, the conference series has grown steadily since its first edition in 2013 into one of Europe’s foremost gatherings in the field of circular nutrient management.
The conference rotates between Belgium and the Netherlands, reflecting the close collaboration between Flemish and Dutch expertise in addressing manure surplus challenges. Recent editions include:
| Edition | Year | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 4th | 2019 | Hasselt, Belgium |
| 5th | 2021/2022 | ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands |
| 6th | 2024 | Antwerp, Belgium |
| 7th (current) | 2026 | Ede/Wageningen, the Netherlands |
Each edition has built on the last, broadening its scope from manure surplus management to encompass innovations in treatment technology, nutrient recovery, valorisation for energy and food production, regulatory policy, and sustainability assessment. The 2026 edition, held 4–5 March at Hotel Reehorst in Ede/Wageningen, with an optional field trip on 6 March to local manure processing installations, continued this tradition under the central theme: manure as a resource.
Continue reading ”Mapping What Works: FERTITEC at ManuREsource 2026, Wageningen”