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Microscopy Images of Microplastics in Photovoltaic-Covered Irrigation Pond Water
Summary
Scientists collected water samples from an irrigation pond covered by solar panels in Spain and used microscope images plus AI tools to detect and measure tiny plastic particles (microplastics) in the water. This matters because irrigation water can carry microplastics into crops and soil, potentially entering our food supply, and better, faster detection methods like this AI-assisted tool could help researchers track contamination more efficiently. Note that this dataset itself doesn't measure health effects; it's a tool-building study for identifying microplastics in water more accurately.
This dataset contains 71 optical microscopy images of suspected microplastic particles collected from water stored in a photovoltaic-covered irrigation pond in Salamanca, Spain, during sampling campaigns conducted between 2024 and 2026. The images include scale references of 100, 200 or 400 µm and show particles with different shapes, sizes and orientations. They were used for manual particle-length measurement and for developing and validating an AI-assisted image-analysis workflow based on automatic scale recognition, SAM2 segmentation, morphological skeletonization and length estimation. Some images contain portions of the grid printed on the filtration membrane, which may interfere with automatic particle segmentation.