I recently got back to Scotland after spending 5 months in Blantyre, Malawi, doing data collection for my PhD. It was great to get out in the field and start gathering data and talking to people, after months of sitting at a desk in Stirling. That said, fieldwork can easily throw up unexpected challenges, and feel overwhelming and hard to manage…
China is truly enormous, comparable in size to the entirety of Europe, and I had little appreciation of this before catching a 3 hour flight only half way across the country from bustling Beijing on the eastern seaboard, the second busiest airport in the world, to Guiyang in the mountainous south west.
If you have an interest in faecal sludge management, then you have probably heard of black soldier fly larvae (BSFL). These bugs have attracted the interest of WASH specialists due to their widespread distribution in the tropics, and emerging use in organic waste management.
Floating treatment wetlands (FTWs) are buoyant frames supporting emergent aquatic plants which allow the expansion of planted vegetation across the water surface. These novel freshwater restoration systems are most commonly employed as tools to improve water quality in small water bodies.
How can we improve the value of Scotland’s water resources? What is the future of water management? What is a Hydro Nation? These were some of the questions we tried to answer when we set out on a week-long road trip across Scotland this summer on our Hydro Nation scholarship scheme summer school.
Parasites are tricky little things, aren’t they? They’re often small and hard to find, can be difficult to treat, and by their very nature, they thrive by making their hosts miserable. Many people hear the word and think of tapeworms, ticks, or that zombie wasp fungus that made it into National Geographic.
Over two days in March this year, Wageningen University in the Netherlands hosted one of an increasing number of international conferences showcasing the academic and industrial state of play in the world of insects as food and feed.
If you were to be asked ‘What do farmed fish in Europe eat?’, your first answer would probably not be insect larvae! And you’d be right. Concerns about overfishing wild catch to feed farmed fish has led to greater inclusion of vegetable ingredients in aquafeed, leading to competition with human food resources.
Intensification of agricultural systems resulting from an increase in demand for food production can lead to unsustainable use of (in)organic fertiliser. For example an increase in on farm livestock numbers will lead to increased volumes of faeces being applied to land either as slurry, manure, or direct deposits from grazing livestock.
