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Natural sorting of microplastics in sands of the wave runup zone: why not to use it to ease environmental monitoring?
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Researchers assessed natural sorting of microplastics in Baltic Sea beach sand wave runup zones across three surveys spanning 100 to 500 km of coastline and 14 months of temporal monitoring. They found low spatial and temporal variability in the 0.5-2 mm size fraction (averaging 30-53 items per kg dry weight), suggesting the wave runup zone could serve as a standardized, low-effort monitoring environment.
Plastics are now ubiquitous in the marine environment. However, their distribution is highly heterogeneous, making it difficult to develop reliable monitoring methods and requiring much greater sampling efforts to ensure accuracy and comparability of results. Natural sorting processes can help to capture more or less stationary features of the contamination pattern. Data from three monitoring surveys over sandy beaches of the Baltic Sea show a low spatial and temporal variability of the abundance of MPs particles (including fibers) in the size range 0.5-2 mm (hereafter abbreviated as S-MPs) in sands of the wave runup zone. The survey along 100 km of sandy shore of the Curonian Spit showed the mean abundance of S-MPs of 53 ± 36 items/kgDW in the runup zone at 6 stations. The survey along 500 km of the southern Baltic shore (7 locations) found a mean of 30 ± 14 items/kgDW. The third study examined temporal variations of S-MPs abundance during 14 months (42 monitorings, 175 samples) in sands of the wave runup zone at the tip of the Vistula Spit: the mean was found to be 64±36 items/kgDW. The coefficient of variation CV (CV = (SD/Mean) × 100 Also see: https://micro2024.sciencesconf.org/558463/document
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