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EcoExposure™ for Scalable Geospatial Monitoring of Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Marine Ecosystems: Enabling Frequent Monitoring, Hotspot Identification, and Intervention Evaluation
Original title: EcoExposure™ for Scalable Geospatial Monitoring of Microplastics and Nanoplastics in Marine Ecosystems: Enabling Frequent Monitoring, Hotspot Identification, and Intervention Evaluation
Summary
Scientists have developed a smartphone-based tool called EcoExposure™ that can quickly test ocean water for tiny plastic particles (microplastics and nanoplastics) right in the field, instead of relying only on slow, expensive lab testing. This matters because these plastic particles can build up in seafood and coastal waters, and faster, more widespread monitoring could help identify contamination hotspots sooner—giving us better information about plastics that may end up in the fish and shellfish we eat.
Microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) are increasingly recognized as widespread contaminants of marine ecosystems, with potential impacts on biodiversity, fisheries, aquaculture, and food security. Although laboratory-based analytical techniques remain essential for polymer identification and characterization, their cost and infrastructure requirements often limit monitoring frequency and spatial coverage. There is an increasing need for complementary field-deployable approaches capable of supporting frequent, standardized, and geospatially distributed environmental monitoring. The EcoExposure™ platform is a smartphone-enabled environmental monitoring system that integrates natural reagent chemistry, optical sensing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and standardized geospatial metadata collection to provide rapid field screening of total microplastic and nanoplastic burden. Designed to complement existing laboratory workflows, the platform enables repeat monitoring, hotspot identification, longitudinal assessment, and evaluation of environmental interventions across marine, coastal, estuarine, and aquaculture environments. This paper reviews the need for scalable monitoring throughout the Asia-Pacific region and discusses how AI-enabled field screening may complement centralized laboratory methods by increasing the spatial and temporal resolution of environmental datasets. Figures 1 and 2 provide an overview of regional contamination patterns and illustrate the ecological pathways and monitoring framework supporting distributed marine environmental intelligence.