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Tricaine methanesulfonate (MS-222) has been widely used in intensive aquaculture systems to control stress during handling and confinement operations. This compound is dissolved in the water tanks and, once it is present in the Recirculating Aquaculture Systems (RASs), MS-222 can reach the environment by the discharge of contaminated effluents. The present work proposes the implementation of the adsorption process in the RASs, using pyrolysed biological paper mill sludge as adsorbent, to remove MS-222 from aquaculture wastewater. Adsorption experiments were performed under extreme operating conditions, simulating those corresponding to different farmed fish species: temperature (from 8 to 30 °C), salinity (from 0.8 to 35‰) and different contents of organic and inorganic matter in the aquaculture wastewater. Furthermore, the MS-222 adsorption from a real aquaculture effluent was compared with that from ultrapure water. Under the studied conditions, the performance of the produced adsorbent remained mostly the same, removing satisfactorily MS-222 from water. Therefore, it may be concluded that the produced adsorbent can be employed in intensive aquaculture wastewater treatment with the same performance independently of the farmed fish species., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Recirculating aquaculture systems are highly intensive culture systems that actively filter and reuse water, thus minimizing water requirements and creating relatively small volumes of concentrated waste (compared to flow-through aquaculture systems). Vermicomposting, which uses earthworms to stabilize and transform organic wastes into valuable end-products, has been proposed as an alternative treatment technology for high-moisture-content organic wastes from agricultural, industrial and municipal sources. This study was conducted to determine if the effluent solids from a large recirculating aquaculture facility (Blue Ridge Aquaculture, Martinsville, Virginia) were suitable for vermicomposting using the earthworm Eisenia fetida. In two separate experiments, worms were fed mixtures of solids removed from aquaculture effluent (sludge) and shredded. Mixtures containing 0%, 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, and 50% aquaculture sludge (dry weight basis) were fed to the worms over a 12-week period and their growth (biomass) was measured. Worm mortality, which occurred only in the first experiment, was not influenced by feedstock sludge concentration. In both experiments worm growth rates tended to increase with increasing sludge concentration, with the highest growth rate occurring with feedstocks containing 50% aquaculture sludge. Effluent solids from recirculating aquaculture systems mixed with shredded cardboard appear to be suitable feedstocks for vermicomposting.

The paper deals with the most used metadata formats and thesauri suitable for describing scientific and research papers in the domains agriculture, food industry, aquaculture, environment and rural areas. These include the Dublin Core (DC), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Virtual Open Access Agriculture and Aquaculture Repository Metadata Application Profile (VOA3R AP) and the AGROVOC thesaurus. Having analyzed the metadata formats and research paper lifecycle, the authors would recommend that each paper should entail metadata description as soon as it is published. The metadata are to describe the content and properties of the paper. One of the most suitable metadata formats is the VOA3R AP that is partially patterned on the DC and combined with the AGROVOC thesaurus. As a result, an effective description, availability and automatic data exchange between and among local and central repositories should be attained. The knowledge and data presented in the present paper were obtained as a result of the following research programs and grant schemes: the Grant No. 20121044 of the Internal Grant Agency titled „Using Automatic Metadata Generation for Research Papers“, the Grant agreement No. 250525 funded by the European Commission corresponding to the VOA3R Project (Virtual Open Access Agriculture & Aquaculture Repository: Sharing Scientific and Scholarly Research related to Agriculture, Food, and Environment), http://voa3r.eu and the Research Program titled „Economy of the Czech Agriculture Resources and their Efficient Use within the Framework of the Multifunctional Agrifood Systems“ of the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport number VZ MSM 6046070906. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]