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Microplastics Pollution in Marine Environment

A special issue of Water (ISSN 2073-4441). This special issue belongs to the section "Oceans and Coastal Zones".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 April 2022) | Viewed by 14344

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
OKEANOS Research Center/IMAR, Azores University, 9901-862 Horta, Portugal
Interests: ecotoxicology; deep-sea environments; toxicity; physiology; metal ions; molecular biology; microplastics; pollution
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Guest Editor
CIIMAR | Interdisciplinary Centre of Marine and Environmental Research of the University of Porto, 4450-208 Matosinhos, Portugal
Interests: marine ecology; climate changes; biodiversity and conservation; ecosystems ecology; invasive species

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Guest Editor
IPMA-Portuguese Institute of Sea and Atmosphere, Division of Oceanography and Marine Environment (DIVOA), Av. Doutor Alfredo Magalhães Ramalho, 6, 1495-165 Lisboa, Portugal
Interests: metal accumulation; ecotoxicology; marine organisms
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Microplastic pollution is globally recognized as a significant threat for marine ecosystems. Several studies have been monitoring the large amount of microplastics found floating at the sea surface and deposited on the seabed or stranded on the coastline. Nevertheless, many questions are still missing the right answers. What are the impacts of microplastics to marine biota worldwide? How can plastic debris act as a vector for contaminants in deep-sea and coastal marine systems? How can we measure the scale of the economic impact of microplastic pollution? This Special Issue aims to encourage researchers to address these questions and others related to this topic, develop new ideas and new methodologies to assess microplastic pollution impacts.

Dr. Ines Martins
Dr. Irene Martins
Dr. Joana Raimundo
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • microplastics
  • marine debris
  • deep-sea
  • coastal
  • pollution
  • contaminants

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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14 pages, 3552 KiB  
Article
A Cloud-Based Framework for Large-Scale Monitoring of Ocean Plastics Using Multi-Spectral Satellite Imagery and Generative Adversarial Network
by Ali Jamali and Masoud Mahdianpari
Water 2021, 13(18), 2553; https://doi.org/10.3390/w13182553 - 17 Sep 2021
Cited by 20 | Viewed by 3819
Abstract
Marine debris is considered a threat to the inhabitants, as well as the marine environments. Accumulation of marine debris, besides climate change factors, including warming water, sea-level rise, and changes in oceans’ chemistry, are causing the potential collapse of the marine environment’s health. [...] Read more.
Marine debris is considered a threat to the inhabitants, as well as the marine environments. Accumulation of marine debris, besides climate change factors, including warming water, sea-level rise, and changes in oceans’ chemistry, are causing the potential collapse of the marine environment’s health. Due to the increase of marine debris, including plastics in coastlines, ocean and sea surfaces, and even in deep ocean layers, there is a need for developing new advanced technology for the detection of large-sized marine pollution (with sizes larger than 1 m) using state-of-the-art remote sensing and machine learning tools. Therefore, we developed a cloud-based framework for large-scale marine pollution detection with the integration of Sentinel-2 satellite imagery and advanced machine learning tools on the Sentinel Hub cloud application programming interface (API). Moreover, we evaluated the performance of two shallow machine learning algorithms of random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM), as well as the deep learning method of the generative adversarial network-random forest (GAN-RF) for the detection of ocean plastics in the pilot site of Mytilene Island, Greece. Based on the obtained results, the shallow algorithms of RF and SVM achieved an overall accuracy of 88% and 84%, respectively, with available training data of plastic debris. The GAN-RF classifier improved the detection of ocean plastics of the RF method by 8%, achieving an overall accuracy of 96% by generating several synthetic ocean plastic samples. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microplastics Pollution in Marine Environment)
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Review

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27 pages, 1570 KiB  
Review
Current Progress on Marine Microplastics Pollution Research: A Review on Pollution Occurrence, Detection, and Environmental Effects
by Fei-Fei Liu, Su-Chun Wang, Zhi-Lin Zhu and Guang-Zhou Liu
Water 2021, 13(12), 1713; https://doi.org/10.3390/w13121713 - 21 Jun 2021
Cited by 16 | Viewed by 8938
Abstract
Recently, microplastics pollution has attracted much attention in the environmental field, as researchers have found traces of microplastics in both marine and terrestrial ecological environments. Here, we reviewed and discussed the current progress on microplastics pollution in the marine environment from three main [...] Read more.
Recently, microplastics pollution has attracted much attention in the environmental field, as researchers have found traces of microplastics in both marine and terrestrial ecological environments. Here, we reviewed and discussed the current progress on microplastics pollution in the marine environment from three main aspects including their identification and qualification methods, source and distribution, and fate and toxicity in a marine ecosystem. Microplastics in the marine environment originate from a variety of sources and distribute broadly all around the world, but their quantitative information is still lacking. Up to now, there have been no adequate and standard methods to identify and quantify the various types of microplastics, which need to be developed and unified. The fate of microplastics in the environment is particularly important as they may be transferred or accumulated in the biological chain. Meanwhile, microplastics may have a high adsorption capacity to pollutants, which is the basic research to further study their fate and joint toxicity in the environment. Therefore, all the findings are expected to fill the knowledge gaps in microplastics pollution and promote the development of relative regulations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microplastics Pollution in Marine Environment)
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