Regional approach to modeling the transport of floating plastic debris in the Adriatic Sea

Combining Litter Observations with a Regional Ocean Model to Identify Sources and Sinks of Floating Debris in a Semi-enclosed Basin: The Adriatic Sea

“…Ingestion of plastic by Adriatic fauna has been reported for marine turtles (Lazar and Gračan, 2011;Poppi et al, 2012), sperm whales (Mazzariol et al, 2011) and dolphins (Pribanic et al, 1999) as well as from commercial fish (Avio et al, 2015) and crustacean species (Wieczorek et al, 1999). Liubartseva et al (2016) modeled the transport of AMD using a high-resolution ocean model and a Markov chain to simulate passive particle trajectories, based on transition probability computed from ensemble model trajectories. Liubartseva et al (2016) assumed a constant annual input of AMD, which was split into terrestrial and marine sources and terrestrial inputs were further split according to population.…”

“…Liubartseva et al (2016) modeled the transport of AMD using a high-resolution ocean model and a Markov chain to simulate passive particle trajectories, based on transition probability computed from ensemble model trajectories. Liubartseva et al (2016) assumed a constant annual input of AMD, which was split into terrestrial and marine sources and terrestrial inputs were further split according to population. The methodology presented here differs from Liubartseva et al (2016) in that we use observed debris as input to the particle tracking model.…”

“…Liubartseva et al (2016) assumed a constant annual input of AMD, which was split into terrestrial and marine sources and terrestrial inputs were further split according to population. The methodology presented here differs from Liubartseva et al (2016) in that we use observed debris as input to the particle tracking model. Furthermore, Liubartseva et al (2016) used a statistical approach while we consider specific events that takes variability into account.…”

“…The methodology presented here differs from Liubartseva et al (2016) in that we use observed debris as input to the particle tracking model. Furthermore, Liubartseva et al (2016) used a statistical approach while we consider specific events that takes variability into account. Finally Liubartseva et al (2016) parameterized sub-gridscale turbulence and windage, which are not considered in our methodology (see Section 2.4).…”

“…Identifying sources and sinks of AMD can assist resource managers maximize the effectiveness of prevention and response efforts by providing scientific support to the implementation of public policies. While progress has been made, most relevant studies either relied on observations of beached AMD (Yoon et al, 2010;Kako et al, 2011Kako et al, , 2014Neumann et al, 2014), made assumptions about the amount of AMD as well as its temporal and/or spatial distributions (Lebreton et al, 2012;Critchell et al, 2015;Mansui et al, 2015;Liubartseva et al, 2016), or used coarse resolution velocity data and/or idealized surface currents (Aliani and Molcard, 2003;Maximenko et al, 2012;van Sebille et al, 2012;Reisser et al, 2013;Isobe et al, 2014). Such studies have identified the physical processes relevant to the transport and accumulation of debris, however, the efficacy of models in aiding management efforts depends strongly on the assumptions applied in the particle tracking scheme (Critchell and Lambrechts, 2016) as well as the resolution and accuracy of the underlying velocity field (Putman and He, 2013).…”