Smith Stephen D A, Markic Ana
National Marine Science Centre, Southern Cross University, Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, Australia.
PLoS One. 2013 Dec 18;8(12):e83694. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0083694. eCollection 2013.
Marine debris is a global issue with impacts on marine organisms, ecological processes, aesthetics and economies. Consequently, there is increasing interest in quantifying the scale of the problem. Accumulation rates of debris on beaches have been advocated as a useful proxy for at-sea debris loads. However, here we show that past studies may have vastly underestimated the quantity of available debris because sampling was too infrequent. Our study of debris on a small beach in eastern Australia indicates that estimated daily accumulation rates decrease rapidly with increasing intervals between surveys, and the quantity of available debris is underestimated by 50% after only 3 days and by an order of magnitude after 1 month. As few past studies report sampling frequencies of less than a month, estimates of the scale of the marine debris problem need to be critically re-examined and scaled-up accordingly. These results reinforce similar, recent work advocating daily sampling as a standard approach for accurate quantification of available debris in coastal habitats. We outline an alternative approach whereby site-specific accumulation models are generated to correct bias when daily sampling is impractical.
海洋垃圾是一个全球性问题，对海洋生物、生态过程、美观和经济都有影响。因此，人们越来越关注量化这一问题的规模。海滩上垃圾的积累率被认为是衡量海上垃圾负荷的一个有用指标。然而，我们在此表明，过去的研究可能因采样过于稀疏而极大地低估了可用垃圾的数量。我们对澳大利亚东部一个小海滩上的垃圾进行的研究表明，随着调查间隔时间的增加，估计的每日积累率会迅速下降，仅3天后可用垃圾的数量就被低估了50%，1个月后被低估了一个数量级。由于过去很少有研究报告采样频率低于一个月，因此需要对海洋垃圾问题规模的估计进行严格重新审视并相应地扩大。这些结果强化了近期类似的研究工作，即主张将每日采样作为准确量化沿海栖息地可用垃圾的标准方法。我们概述了一种替代方法，即在每日采样不切实际时，生成特定地点的积累模型以纠正偏差。
