Newquay Marine Group, 54 Bezant Place, Newquay TR7 1SJ, UK.
Newquay University Centre, Cornwall College, Wildflower Lane, Newquay TR7 2LZ, UK.
Mar Pollut Bull. 2023 Sep;194(Pt B):115314. doi: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2023.115314. Epub 2023 Jul 26.
Citizen science is now commonly employed to collect data on plastic pollution and is recognised as a valuable tool for furthering our understanding of the issue. Few studies, however, use citizen science to gather information on water-borne plastic debris. Here, citizen scientists adopted a globally standardised methodology to sample the sea-surface for small (1-5 mm) floating plastic debris off the Cornish coast (UK). Twenty-eight trawls were conducted along five routes, intersecting two Marine Protected Areas. Of the 509 putative plastic items, fragments were most common (64 %), then line (19 %), foam (7 %), film (6 %), and pellets (4 %). Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy identified the most common polymer type as polyethylene (31 %), then nylon (12 %), polypropylene (8 %), polyamide (5 %) and polystyrene (3 %). This study provides the first globally comparative baseline of floating plastic debris for the region (mean: 8512 items km), whilst contributing to an international dataset aimed at understanding plastic abundance and distribution worldwide.
公民科学现在常用于收集塑料污染数据，被公认为进一步了解这一问题的有价值的工具。然而，很少有研究利用公民科学来收集关于水载塑料碎片的信息。在这里，公民科学家采用了全球标准化的方法，在英国康沃尔海岸（英国）的海面采集小（1-5 毫米）漂浮塑料碎片。沿着五条路线进行了 28 次拖网捕捞，这些路线与两个海洋保护区相交。在 509 个疑似塑料物品中，碎片最常见（64%），其次是线（19%）、泡沫（7%）、薄膜（6%）和颗粒（4%）。傅里叶变换红外光谱法确定最常见的聚合物类型是聚乙烯（31%），其次是尼龙（12%）、聚丙烯（8%）、聚酰胺（5%）和聚苯乙烯（3%）。本研究提供了该地区首次全球可比的漂浮塑料碎片基线（平均值：8512 个/km），同时为旨在了解全球塑料丰度和分布的国际数据集做出了贡献。
