Supplementary data for 'Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic'

Here we provide four .xls files containing data associated with the manuscript 'Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating more plastic' published in Scientific Reports by Lebreton et al (2018).added GPGP_contours.shp and MassConcentrationAllSizes.tif, GIS layers used to build Figure 3.Lebreton <i>et al</i>. Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic. <i>Scientific Reports </i>8,<i> </i>4666 (2018)<br>Below are brief descriptions of each file:<br><br><b>Lebreton2018_Concentration.xls</b>Summary data containing ocean plastics concentrations as presented in Figure 3 (b,c,d,e) of the main manuscript. We provide midpoint, lower and higher estimated numerical and mass concentrations, as well as raw data (i.e. not corrected for vertical mixing) for each sampling event and for microplastics (0.05-0.5 cm), mesoplastics (0.5-5 cm), macroplastics (5-50 cm) and megaplastics (&gt; 50 cm).<br><br><b>Lebreton2018_SamplingInformation.xls</b>This file contains the raw data used to estimate the ocean plastic concentrations reported in Lebreton2018_Concentration.xls. The first tab contains information for all sampling events of this study, including location, date, sampling method (i.e. Manta net tow, Mega net tow, or RGB mosaic), sampled surface area and weather conditions. The 'TrawlDebrisInfo' tab provides the number and mass of debris found in the contents collected by each net tow, while the 'MosaicDebrisInfo' tab contains information related to every ocean plastic identified in the aerial RGB mosaics. This file also provides: (1) the ocean plastic rising velocities used to estimate 'vertically integrated’ ocean plastic concentrations, and (2) the ocean plastic top view surface area x dry weight measurements used to estimate the mass of debris sighted in the RGB mosaics.<br><br><b>Lebreton2018_Characterisation.xls</b>This file includes classification of ocean plastic pieces into object types, as well as polymer types by Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) analysis. It also contains the production dates, languages and countries of production identified on ocean plastics examined during this study.<br><br><b>Lebreton2018_HistoricalDataset.xls</b>Historical data on microplastic concentrations as measured by surface net tows conduced within and around the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Individual sampling stations are indexed as 'within’ (1) or ‘outside' (0) the GPGP boundary predicted by the numerical model presented in the study.<br><b>GPGP_contours.shp</b>Modelled mass concentration contours of microplastics, used to define the GPGP boundary.<br>ELEV = 1; 10 g/km² - ELEV = 2; 100 g/km² - ELEV = 3; 1 kg/km²<br><b>MassConcentrationAllSizes.tif</b>Modelled mass concentration for all size classes. Expressed in log10 of g/km²