Plastic pollution is of common agreement among researchers that it is an increasing threat but is the information that we have so far enough to understand what it is really happening? Where are the major threats?
Plastic is present everywhere we go, and we don’t even notice it. Recent studies showed that there are around 8 million tons of plastic debris entering our oceans per year. And there are no signs of this trend slowing down. It is known that around 450 marine species are negatively impacted by these particles by ingestion of these particles, entanglement, habitat damage and the spread of non-native species.
Luckily, a wide range of strategies have been applied worldwide at different organizational levels (either international, national, regional or local) to minimize and reduce marine pollution in the environment. The applied strategies differ according to the source, type of item, location, and stakeholders involved. Some examples of these strategies include recycling, bans and imposed fees (e.g. plastic bag bans), action plans and regulatory agreements. Additionally, cleaning-up and/or behavior change strategies, such as beach cleaning actions have been identified as one of the most important strategies at the moment.
The key to any mitigation program is to determine if they actually work. Therefore, there is an important need to see if these strategies are translating into a decrease of plastic in the environment! To measure the effectiveness of mitigation programs we need long term, robust, quantifiable and reliable data to be able to assess changes over time, patterns and trends. Basically, we need big datasets…The problem with these datasets is that they require long and coordinated efforts with individuals, universities, and other groups.
Community science can play an important and crucial role by providing not only big datasets at a temporal and geographical scale but also by engaging the communities and raising public awareness. Here is where my PhD enters in the picture.
Heidi Taylor is my supervisor and founder of the Tangaroa Blue Foundation (TBF: https://www.tangaroablue.org/) an Australian NGO that coordinates the Australian Marine Debris Initiative (AMDI), that is an established network of communities, schools, industries, government agencies, and individuals who aim to quantify and reduce marine debris in our communities and oceans.
AMDI has 14 years of community-driven data collected with a standardized methodology (e.g., beach clean-ups) from almost 3000 sites Australia wide and accounts with more than 10 million pieces of debris were recorded. This is a bold and exciting dataset allowing us to answer big and important questions.
But before do some useful use of this dataset we need to see what data is available?
The aims of the first chapter of my PhD was to highlight where the most urgent actions are required by identifying global geographic distribution trends and gaps regarding beach debris abundance, and by evaluating the performance of the existing studies (the available data). Therefore, the first chapter of my PhD is a systematic review over the available information regarding beach plastic debris abundance worldwide (We just submitted our paper, fingers crossed!!!). We want to know what data is out there to better understand and make sense of what is available, therefore, provide recommendations for future studies. We also want to understand the do’s and don’ts as well as highlight the most common errors among researchers!
What have we found out?
We can see that for each of the parameters that we extracted from all the papers included in the review we had a significant percentage of non-reported information… and some are really important information regarding the methodology which makes them unable or difficult to be repeated.Some studies report different metrics, they don’t report (important) information (example the dimension of the transects) or they have different methodologies for the same thing.
The key information here is that if we want to understand a bigger picture of what is happening with marine and plastic pollution in our environments we need standardization of the methodology and the way we report it.
We need to more aware about the importance of the data we are publishing, what we are reporting and how we are reporting it. In other words, we need to start speaking the same language and work together towards a solution…
...or we will not be able to understand what is happening, where it is happening, and how we should act.
