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Fate and Transport of Microplastics in Freshwater Ecosystems - The 100 Plastic River Network
Summary
The 100 Plastic River network is developing a standardized, globally applicable methodology for sampling microplastics from surface water and sediment across freshwater systems on all continents, addressing the severe lack of consistent methods in current research. Early results from citizen science sampling campaigns demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for large-scale freshwater monitoring.
The fate and transport of microplastics in freshwater ecosystem is critically understudied, suffering from a severe lack of consistence in sampling and extraction methods between emerging case studies. The 100 Plastic River network aims to develop a generally applicable methodology for microplastic sampling and extraction, deployed for both surface water and sediment sampling across all continents. We will present the validated field methodology and results from first citizen science sampling campaigns across European river estuaries, discussing the challenges and opportunities for such community approach. We will discuss how the derived global information of flow weighted surface water plastics concentrations and depth profiled streambed sediment plastic samples will help to identify source area contributions of primary and secondary microplastics in rivers world-wide. We will further present future approaches of langrangian plastics monitoring in selected large river systems in order to elucidate how hydrodynamic conditions and plastic properties control microplastic degradation and ageing as well as deposition and accumulation in freshwater ecosystems – potentially resulting the generation of a pollution legacy for generations to come.