Identifying Marine Sources of Beached Plastics through a Bayesian Framework: Application to Southwest Netherlands

Beaches are thought to be a large reservoir for marine plastics. To protect vulnerable beaches, it is advantageous to have information on the sources of this plastic. Here, we develop a universally applicable Bayesian framework to map sources of plastic arriving on a specific beach. In this framework, we combine Lagrangian backtracking simulations of drifting particles with estimates of plastic input from coastlines, rivers and fisheries. The advantage over traditional Lagrangian simulations is that the Bayesian framework can consider information on known sources, and thus facilitates spatiote... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Duinen, Bram
Kaandorp, Mikael L. A.
van Sebille, Erik
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
Schlagwörter: Bayes theorem / Lagrangian modeling / backtracking / marine pollution / plastic pollution / Geophysics / Earth and Planetary Sciences(all)
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-29203038
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/418209

Beaches are thought to be a large reservoir for marine plastics. To protect vulnerable beaches, it is advantageous to have information on the sources of this plastic. Here, we develop a universally applicable Bayesian framework to map sources of plastic arriving on a specific beach. In this framework, we combine Lagrangian backtracking simulations of drifting particles with estimates of plastic input from coastlines, rivers and fisheries. The advantage over traditional Lagrangian simulations is that the Bayesian framework can consider information on known sources, and thus facilitates spatiotemporal source attribution for plastic arriving at the specified beach. We show that the main sources for our target beach in southwest Netherlands are the east coast of the UK, the Dutch coast, the English Channel (fisheries) and the Thames, Seine, Rhine and Trieux (rivers). We also show that floating time is a major uncertainty in source attribution using backtracking.