BackgroundThe salmon louse, Lepeophtheirus salmonis, is an ectoparasitic copepod which feeds on the mucus, skin and blood of salmonid fish species. The parasite can persist on the surface of the fish without any effective control being exerted by the host immune system. Other ectoparasitic invertebrates produce compounds in their saliva, excretions and/or secretions which modulate the host immune responses allowing them to remain on or in the host during development. Similarly, compounds are produced in secretions of L. salmonis which are thought to be responsible for immunomodulation of the host responses as well as other aspects of crucial host-parasite interactions.MethodsIn this study we have identified and characterised the proteins in the excretory/secretory (E/S) products of L. salmonis using LC-ESI-MS/MS.ResultsIn total 187 individual proteins were identified in the E/S collected from adult lice and pre-adult sea lice. Fifty-three proteins, including 13 serine-type endopeptidases, 1 peroxidase and 5 vitellogenin-like proteins were common to both adult and pre-adult E/S products. One hundred and seven proteins were identified in the adult E/S but not in the pre-adult E/S and these included serine and cysteine-type endopeptidases, vitellogenins, sphingomyelinase and calreticulin. A total of 27 proteins were identified in pre-adult E/S products but not in adult E/S.ConclusionsThe assigned functions of these E/S products and the potential roles they play in host-parasite interaction is discussed.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13071-018-2885-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Scour jeopardises the safety of many civil engineering structures with foundations in riverbeds and it is the leading cause for the collapse of bridges worldwide. Current approaches for bridge scour risk management rely mainly on visual inspections, which provide unreliable estimates of scour and of its effects, also considering the difficulties in visually monitoring the riverbed erosion around submerged foundations. Thus, there is a need to introduce systems capable of continuously monitoring the evolution of scour at bridge foundations, even during extreme flood events. This paper illustrates the development and deployment of a scour monitoring system consisting of smart probes equipped with electromagnetic sensors. This is the first application of this type of sensing probes to a real case-study for continuous scour monitoring. Designed to observe changes in the permittivity of the medium around bridge foundations, the sensors allow for detection of scour depths and the assessment of whether the scour hole has been refilled. The monitoring system was installed on the A76 200 Bridge in New Cumnock (S-W Scotland) and has provided a continuous recording of the scour for nearly two years. The scour data registered after a peak flood event (validated against actual measurements of scour during a bridge inspection) show the potential of the technology in providing continuous scour measures, even during extreme flood events, thus avoiding the deployment of divers for underwater examination.

The treatment technologies discussed in this article explore the removal of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs). There are no regulations currently restricting CECs, but with the recent media attention and increasing public awareness of the issue, as well as improving technology to detect these substances, regulations may be on the horizon. The future regulatory scenarios to address these CECs will be of most interest to utility managers. There are several source control alternatives as well as treatment technologies that can help to reduce CEC concentrations in drinking water. This article summarizes the effects, removal, and regulatory responses to CECs and outlines where more research is needed. Water utilities are encouraged to begin planning for long‐term upgrades and policies to address CECs. In addition, the authors encourage cooperation between water and wastewater utilities.

Abstract. Bridges are critical-infrastructure components of road and rail transport networks. A large number of these critical assets cross or are adjacent to waterways and floodplains and are therefore exposed to flood actions such as scour, hydrodynamic loading, and inundation, all of which are exacerbated by debris accumulations. These stressors are widely recognized as responsible for the vast majority of bridge failures around the world, and they are expected to be exacerbated due to climate change. While efforts have been made to increase the robustness of bridges to the flood hazard, many scientific and technical gaps remain. These gaps were explored during an expert workshop that took place in April 2021 with the participation of academics, consultants, and decision makers operating mainly in the United Kingdom and specializing in the fields of bridge risk assessment and management and flood resilience. The objective of the workshop was to identify and prioritize the most urgent and significant impediments to bridge flood resilience. In particular, the following issues, established at different levels and scales of bridge flood resilience, were identified and analysed in depth: (i) characterization of the effects of floods on different bridge typologies, (ii) uncertainties in formulae for scour depth assessment, (iii) evaluation of consequences of damage, (iv) recovery process after flood damage, (v) decision-making under uncertainty for flood-critical bridges, and (vi) use of event forecasting and monitoring data for increasing the reliability of bridge flood risk estimations. These issues are discussed in this paper to inform other researchers and stakeholders worldwide, guide the directions of future research in the field, and influence policies for risk mitigation and rapid response to flood warnings, ultimately increasing bridge resilience.

Flood-induced scour is among the most common external causes of bridge failures worldwide. In the United States, scour is the cause of 22 bridges fails every year, whereas in the UK, it contributed significantly to the 138 collapses of bridges in the last century. Scour assessments are currently based on visual inspections, which are time-consuming and expensive. Nowadays, sensor and communication technologies offer the possibility to assess in real time the scour depth at critical bridge locations; yet, monitoring an entire infrastructure network is not economically feasible. A way to overcome this limitation is to instal scour monitoring systems at critical bridge locations, and then extend the piece of information gained to the other assets exploiting the correlations present in the system. In this article, we propose a scour hazard model for road and railway bridge scour management that utilises information from a limited number of scour monitoring systems to achieve a more confined estimate of the scour risk for a bridge network. A Bayesian network is used to describe the conditional dependencies among the involved random variables and to update the scour depth distribution using data from monitoring of scour and river flow characteristics. This study constitutes the first application of Bayesian networks to bridge scour risk assessment. The proposed probabilistic framework is applied to a case study consisting of several road bridges in Scotland. The bridges cross the same river, and only one of them is instrumented with a scour monitoring system. It is demonstrated how the Bayesian network approach allows to significantly reduce the uncertainty in the scour depth at unmonitored bridges.