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The primary challenge of agriculture and livestock production is to face the growing competition between food, feed, fibre, and fuel, converting them from resource-intensive to resource-efficient. A circular economy approach, using agricultural by-products/co-products, in the livestock production system would allow to reduce, reuse, and redistribute the resources. Former food products (FFPs), also named ex-foods, could represent a valid option in strengthening resilience in animal nutrition. FFPs have a promising potential to be included regularly in animal diets due to their nutritive value, although their potential in animal nutrition remains understudied. A thorough investigation of the compositional and dietary features, thus, is essential to provide new and fundamental insights to effectively reuse FFPs as upgraded products for swine nutrition. Safety aspects, such as the microbial load or the presence of packaging remnants, should be considered with caution. Here, with a holistic approach, we review several aspects of FFPs and their use as feed ingredients: the nutritional and functional evaluation, the impact of the inclusion of FFPs in pigs’ diet on growth performance and welfare, and further aspects related to safety and sustainability of FFPs.

One of most demanding problems for decision makers and for process engineers is the design of a proper energy strategy to guarantee clean energy supply. This problem is complex and cannot be assessed considering only the standard efficiency criteria used in the past. The process of energy production needs to be analyzed in its completeness, from seed to consumption. This paper deals with the issue of bioenergy production following a nexus perspective, considering the link among water, food and energy. In particular, an objective function depending on the most important resources required in bioenergy production is defined so that it can be simply optimized. Considering the parameter interrelationship among water, food and land (the so-called water-food-energy nexus) the method gives the instruments to determine, in one single function, the optimal condition with respect to these resources. Two cases of study are analysed, dissimilar regarding the geographical location, environmental resources availability for energy production and food security. Results show how the proposed method is able to describe the present sustainability of bioenergy production in a certain site. Furthermore, it can help to investigate the existence of bottlenecks related to the current situation of the site and, at the same time, it can highlight future opportunities in producing sustainable bioenergy.

The influence of land use changes on flood occurrence and severity in the Bisagno River (Thyrrenian Liguria, N.W. Italy is investigated using a Monte Carlo simulation approach (Rulli and Rosso, 2002). High resolution land-use maps for the area were reconstructed and scenario simulations were made for a pre-industrial (1878), an intermediate (1930) and a current (1980) year. Land-use effects were explored to assess the consequences of distributed changes in land use due to agricultural practice and urbanisation. Hydraulic conveyance effects were considered, to assess the consequences of channel modifications associated with engineering works in the lower Bisagno River network. Flood frequency analyses of the annual flood series, retrieved from the simulations, were used to examine the effect of land-use change and river conveyance on flood regime. The impact of these effects proved to be negligible in the upper Bisagno River, moderate in the downstream river and severe in the small tributaries in the lower Bisagno valley that drain densely populated urban areas. The simulation approach is shown to be capable of incorporating historical data on landscape and river patterns into quantitative methods for risk assessment. Keywords: flood, simulation, distributed model, land-use changes, channel modifications, historical data

A stochastic rainfall generator and a deterministic rainfall-runoff model, both distributed in space and time, are combined to provide accurate flood frequency prediction in the Bisagno River basin (Thyrrenian Liguria, N.W. Italy). The inadequacy of streamflow records with respect to the return period of the required flow discharges makes the stochastic simulation methodology a useful operational alternative to a regionalisation procedure for flood frequency analysis and derived distribution techniques. The rainfall generator is the Generalized Neyman-Scott Rectangular Pulses (GNSRP) model. The rainfall-runoff model is the FEST98 model. The GNSRP generator was calibrated using a continuous 7-years' record of hourly precipitation measurements at five raingauges scattered over the Bisagno basin. The calibrated rainfall model was then used to generate a 1000 years' series of continuous rainfall data at the gauging sites and a flood-oriented model validation procedure was developed to evaluate the agreement between observed and simulated extreme values of rainfall at different scales of temporal aggregation. The synthetic precipitation series were input to the FEST98 model to provide flood hydrographs at selected cross-sections across the river network. Flood frequency analysis of the annual flood series (AFS) obtained from these simulations was undertaken using L-moment estimations of Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distributions. The results are compared with those determined by applying a regional flood analysis in Thyrrhenian Liguria and the derived distribution techniques to the Bisagno river basin. This approach is also useful to assess the effects of changes in land use on flood frequency regime (see Rosso and Rulli, 2002). Keywords: flood frequency, stochastic rainfall generator, distributed rainfall runoff model, derived distribution