The World Health Organization Global Action Plan recommends integrated surveillance programs as crucial strategies for monitoring antibiotic resistance. Although several national surveillance programs are in place for clinical and veterinary settings, no such schemes exist for monitoring antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the environment. In this transnational study, we developed, validated, and tested a low-cost surveillance and...

Longyearbyen is the largest settlement on Svalbard archipelago, with 2400 permanent residents and approximately 150,000 tourists visiting every year. The city annually releases approximately 285,000 m3 of untreated wastewater to the nearby Adventfjorden. To date, the environmental impact of this continuous input has been studied mainly regarding the sediments and benthic fauna in the fiord. Here, we present results from a study...

Wastewater treatment processes are monitored mainly in terms of biogenic substance removal efficiency. Little is known about the treated wastewater microbiome and its influence on the recipient. In this study, a wide range of methods (cultivation, microscopic analysis, New Generation Sequencing and Real Time PCR) were employed to determine the bacterial community composition of the treated wastewater and its receiver. Preliminary...