Occurrence and characteristics of microplastics on insular beaches in the Western Tropical Atlantic Ocean
1
Institute of Oceanography, Federal University of Rio Grande, Rio Grande, RS, Brazil
2
Department of Oceanography, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil
3
Institute of Oceanography, Federal University of Rio Grande, RIO GRANDE, RS, Brazil
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Environmental Sciences
- Keywords
- oceanic islands, Blue Amazon, marine conservation, plastic fragments, size class, virgin plastic pellets
- Copyright
- © 2017 Ivar do Sul et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Occurrence and characteristics of microplastics on insular beaches in the Western Tropical Atlantic Ocean. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2901v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2901v1
Abstract
Microplastics are widespread throughout oceans and seas and beaches are no exceptions. On beach sediments, microplastics (<5mm) are commonly prevalent over macroplastics (>5mm), where fragments of larger items are sampled in greater amounts. The occurrence and characteristics of microplastics were investigated on beaches of Fernando de Noronha, Abrolhos and Trindade islands located in the western tropical Atlantic Ocean. Despite no microplastic was identified in Abrolhos at this time, small spatial variations were detected in Fernando de Noronha and Trindade islands, highlighting the importance of oceanographic variables on plastics distribution and accumulation over time.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.