Are there combined effects of treated sewage discharge and land use on rivers?

Today our two papers on #sewage pollution have been published. The first paper, published on Global Change Biology (link to the paper) explored potential interaction between sewage discharge and surrounding land uses, such as #urbanisation and #agriculture.

In this paper we found that a model which included an interaction between sewage pollution and month of sampling was the best predictor of nutrient concentrations, abundance of benthic algae and sewage fungus

More tolerant groups of macroinvertebrate and algae were more abundant with sewage. Overall, sewage discharge alone had a greater impact on water quality and benthic communities, regardless of the land uses, although agriculture had an effect on EPT score

In the second paper we described an innovative method to quantify sewage filaments also when they are not visible in the river with naked eyes. The method involves a combination of machine learning, flow cytometry and microscopy.

It was great to contribute to the knowledge of #sewage pollution and hopefully we can keep informing water firms and governments to make a change! #stopriverpollution

Our research has been featured in several media news, including The Guardian! (link to the news article), the Telegraph (link here), Metro (link here), the Save Windermere Campaign web site (link here), the Biology Department News at the University of Oxford (link here) and the Somerville College news (link here).