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A Public Database for Microplastics in the Environment
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This paper describes the design and deployment of a public database for storing and sharing standardized microplastic monitoring data across Europe, enabling harmonized comparison of results from different studies and supporting EU policy development on plastic pollution.
During recent years plastics became one of the focuses of EU policy. A harmonisation and comparability of microplastics monitoring results across Europe is needed. The complexity of microplastic data makes it necessary to develop a specific, tailor-made database rather than adapting and modifying one of the existing databases. To meet this demand, we present a publicly accessible, flexible, and extendable structured relational database for particle-based microplastic data. The developed relational database is adaptive and meets the specific demands of microplastics, e.g., a large variety of sampling, processing and analytical methods, many types of plastics, and a very wide size spectrum ranging from micrometres to millimetres. In this paper we discuss the development of the database, data entry specifics, sample analysis methods, microplastics data manipulation and quality assurance, and database integration and accessibility.
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