Floating plastics in Adriatic waters (Mediterranean Sea): From the macro- to the micro-scale

Visual observations of floating macro litter around Italy (Mediterranean Sea)

“…AML densities found in our study (mean value 492 items/km 2 ; max: 9205 items/km 2 ) are in accordance with the abundance of floating objects observed in the Strait of Malacca (Ryan, 2013b), in Indonesian waters (Uneputty & Evans, 1997) and in the Northwest Pacific (Titmus & Hyrenbach, 2011), where very high AML concentrations, often exceeding 4000-6000 items/km 2 were found, as well as with some noticeably high values recently reported from the Adriatic Sea (Zeri et al, 2018) and from the Eastern Mediterranean basin (Constantino et al, 2019). Conversely -with the only notable exception of an early study by Morris (1980) -lower AML concentrations are usually reported in Mediterranean waters, with mean values ranging from 2-5 items/km 2 (e.g.…”

“…Regarding the distribution of floating material over the central Mediterranean, our findings seem to confirm the patterns previously reported by Suaria & Aliani in 2014, with maximum densities of anthropogenic litter found in the Southern Adriatic Sea and lower densities observed in the Central Tyrrhenian and Sicilian Seas. The Adriatic Sea has recently been highlighted as a hot-spot for floating (Arcangeli et al, 2018;Zeri et al, 2018;Palatinus et al, 2019), benthic (Pasquini et al, 2016;Fortibuoni et al, 2019;Strafella et al, 2019) and beach litter (Vlachogianni et al, 2018), and our findings provide further evidence about the severity of the problem for the entire Adriatic region. Indeed, the Po river in the Northern Adriatic, was already identified as one of the largest contributors of plastic pollution to the entire Mediterranean, being responsible for an annual influx of 1350 tons of plastic year -1 (Liubartseva et al, 2018), with this also explaining the higher concentration of natural litter observed in this region (presumably of riverine origin), as well as the correlation between the two in the entire Adriatic basin.…”

“…Derraik, 2002;Thiel et al, 2003;Gregory, 2009;Hinojosa & Thiel, 2009;Titmus & Hyrenbach, 2011;Ryan, 2013a. ), as well as from the Mediterranean Sea (Galgani et al, 2010;Pasquini et al, 2016;Vlachogianni et al, 2018;Zeri et al, 2018;Constantino et al, 2019;Palatinus et al, 2019), consistently reporting the prevalence of plastic (accounting for more than 70%, sometimes up to 90-100%) in floating, benthic and beach litter. Most of the plastic items observed during our survey were categorized as irregular plastic fragments, suggesting a secondary origin of these items, probably derived from the fragmentation of larger objects.…”

https://researchopenworld.com/abundance-composition-and-spatial-distribution-of-marine-plastic-litter-in-sea-surface-waters-around-cap-corse/#

“…No granule was found. Such proportion is consistent with previous results reported [39] and it was highlighted that the proportion of fragments was especially important in the north of Corsica compared to other stations throughout the Western Mediterranean Sea [31].…”

“…We highlighted a heterogeneous distribution of floating litter as the plastic density characterizing the area between Bastia and Macinaggio (27 027 items/km 2 ) was, on average, 2.31 times higher than the density estimated between Macinaggio and Pino (11 688 items.km 2 ) (Fig.1). Several studies highlighted that spatio-temporal variability of plastic densities and sizes of plastics (micro, meso, macroplastics) could be tightly linked with hydrodynamics and wind regime [31,38], distance to land [29,39], coastal human population [40,41] and maritime traffic [23]. In our case, the difference in densities found between the regions Bastia-Macinaggio and Macinaggio-Pino, could be consistent with coastal human population pressure whereby the area with an estimated higher density is located close to Bastia, a city of more than 44 000 inhabitants.…”