Online First

Sustainable water security and management in South Africa have challenges that include climate change impacts, increasing water demand, and dysfunctional infrastructure. These challenges result in the necessity for additional water management and reclamation strategies. Greywater (domestic wastewater) has been recognized for its potential for treatment and reuse for non-potable purposes such as toilet-flushing, irrigation, and firefighting. This wastewater management strategy has been highlighted as important because greywater is produced in large quantities and has low to medium pollution levels. The benefits of this strategy are not only related to the decreasing of freshwater use but also to preparedness for emergency disasters such as disease outbreaks (provision of consistent sanitation and hygiene) and urban/rural fires. Various greywater treatment systems (GWTs) have been operated, evaluated, and implemented. The threat from the implementation of GWTs is the recalcitrant microbial content in treated greywater which pose health risks to the environment and when reused for mentioned non-potable purposes. This is assessed by the low microbial removal efficiencies of different GWTs. Risk assessment methods from previous studies are considered, for example, the Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA), and Cumulative Risk Rating (CRR). This review presents a framework for a microbial risk assessment approach in the context of greywater treatment and reuse in South Africa.

Roma palaces are among the most visually distinctive yet publicly contested forms of post-socialist architecture in Romania, but they remain largely absent from formal heritage and tourism frameworks. This study examines the architectural and spatial characteristics of the Roma palaces in Huedin, their representation in the media, and the conditions under which selected buildings could be incorporated into a culturally responsible tourism initiative. A multi-method case-study design combined a georeferenced inventory of 86 palaces, field observation and GIS mapping, qualitative content analysis of 46 media items published between 2010 and 2025, and three semi-structured interviews with a member of a palace-owning household, a municipal representative, and a civic activist. The inventory revealed a concentrated and recurrent architectural profile: 54.7% of the buildings were located on Horea Street (E60), 60.5% had multi-tiered or pavilion-style roofs, 75.6% included turrets or towers, and 55.8% were classified as fully completed. Media attention was strongly event-driven and conflict-oriented. Explicit conflict was identified in 67.4% of the items, while the dominant frames concerned tourism, heritage, and territorial branding, as well as wealth, migration, crime, and social inequality. The interviews provided a more differentiated perspective by highlighting family obligations, migration, seasonal use, hospitality, generational change, and internal social differences. The findings show that public visibility has not produced institutional recognition or shared interpretive authority. Any tourism initiative would require prior consent, community participation, negotiated access, agreed rules regarding photography, and the co-production of interpretation with palace owners and other local actors.

Rural architectural heritage reflects the history and cultural identity of communities, yet the degradation of many monuments limits their visitation and valorization. Digital technologies provide alternative means of presenting and promoting this heritage. This study aimed to create a virtual tour of Bocskai Castle in Aghireșu, Cluj County, based on a 3D model obtained through UAV photogrammetry and integrated into an online spatial storytelling product. The castle, a Renaissance monument in Țara Călatei (Kalotaszeg region), was selected following preliminary identification of ten noble residences in the region, based on the 2015 List of Historic Monuments and available bibliographic and cartographic information. Research on the castle included field observations, a semi-structured interview with a local historian, and analysis of 80 Google Maps reviews published between 2018 and 2026. The work was completed through a UAV campaign, which generated 6,986 images, and through terrestrial photographs. Photogrammetric processing produced a georeferenced point cloud, a digital surface model, an orthophotoplan, and a textured 3D model. The materials were integrated into ArcGIS StoryMaps in a narrative with eleven sections, of which three comprise the virtual tour of the castle. The narrative presents the monument in relation to its territorial, historical, and cultural context, through architectural information, maps, photographs, and video materials. The results indicate that UAV photogrammetry can detail the current state of a degraded and partially inaccessible monument, including structural discontinuities and material losses. The virtual tour increases the visibility of the castle and facilitates free access to information, supporting the valorization and tourist promotion of rural heritage

We establish what a multi-criteria land evaluation model can and cannot say about the risk that decides whether a strategic crop is kept at the local scale, and what growers’ knowledge corrects. The case is Rîșca commune, 6564 ha in the Apuseni Mountains, where potato is the main cash crop and is grown without irrigation. The model retains the crop-specific scoring curves of the official Romanian land evaluation methodology for six indicators and runs them under four aggregation rules, with weights taken only from external sources; agreement is reported after correcting for the areal share of each class. Hazard enters as a daily series for 59 grid cells over 1990–2025, resolved by phenological window; exposure comes from 277 parcels declared under potato (103.57 ha) and from sites mapped by growers; the qualitative component comes from eleven narrative interviews. Slope alone sets the class for 58.4% of the modelled area and is part of the limiting factor for 64.8%, whereas climatic indicators are the sole limiting factor for 8.6%. Almost half of the area actually cropped, 45.5%, falls in the two lowest classes of the official instrument. The two hazards never coincide in thirty-six years, but the expected coincidence is below half a year, so compound behaviour cannot be determined at this scale. Changing the aggregation rule shifts the level of the scores without changing the ranking of land units; an imported weight set re-ranks them. Under three of the four rules, the classification places more than 73% of the area in a single class, and agreement with growers’ judgement can no longer be tested. The qualitative component corrects two inferences that the spatial data alone would have supported: that the area declared each year measures the crop that is maintained, and that the silence of the interpolated field on topographic position means the phenomenon is absent. The agreement protocol prevents a third: that agreement with grower-indicated parcels validates the model. Most constraints invoked in decisions to withdraw from the crop are non-climatic risk drivers, which an assessment built on land suitability does not contain.