Trash Dance: Anthropogenic Litter and Organic Matter Co-Accumulate on Urban Beaches

Abstract

Anthropogenic litter (i.e., trash, AL) on beaches has negative ecological and economic impacts. Beach AL is likely moved together with coarse particulate organic matter (CPOM, algae, leaves), but no previous studies have assessed AL and CPOM co-distribution. We measured AL and CPOM on four urban beaches in Chicago, Illinois, USA, along two transect types (pier-adjacent, non-pier adjacent) in which each has three habitats (upland, beach, strand line). As expected, AL and CPOM density were positively related across all transects. AL and CPOM were significantly higher adjacent to piers, and variable among habitats. Wood, leaves, and smoking-related AL were most abundant in beach and upland zones while glass and algal detritus were abundant at the strandline. Overall, AL and CPOM show ‘patchy’ distribution attributed to wind and wave movement toward accumulation sites. Beach CPOM is a hot spot of biological activity (e.g., microbes, invertebrates, birds). Therefore, mixing of AL and CPOM suggests organisms may be more likely to encounter AL in mixed accumulations. Efforts to reduce the abundance and biological impacts of beach AL will benefit from emphasizing organic matter accumulation sites.

Litter Detection with Deep Learning: A Comparative Study

“…Additionally, one of the main concerns is the accumulation of litter not only in the urban area [ 8 ], but, mainly, in ecological areas [ 9 , 10 ]. To investigate and tackle this challenge, decision-makers require reliable data—not only on the sources of waste, but also on its composition, distribution and magnitude over large geographic areas.…”

Critical Gaps in Shoreline Plastics Pollution Research

“…These logistical reasons may be why some researchers document avoiding shoreline areas with large organic deposits (Blumenröder et al, 2017;Edo et al, 2019;Leads and Weinstein, 2019), while others report moving organic material out of the way in order to sample the sand below (Wessel et al, 2016;Abidli et al, 2018;Hansen and Gross, 2019). However, given that high quantities of recently deposited plastic debris can be expected within these mounds of stranded organic matter (Thornton and Jackson, 1998;Gutow et al, 2016;Rodrigues et al, 2019;Lazcano et al, 2020), their avoidance may result in an underestimation of plastic pollution density particularly given the strong association between deposits of organic material and plastic debris, which has been noted by several researchers within this corpus (Thornton and Jackson, 1998;Velander and Mocogni, 1998;Viehman et al, 2011;Dippo, 2012;Zhou et al, 2018;Rodrigues et al, 2019).…”

“…In the laboratory, coarse sediment also generates plastic particles (particularly microplastics) through mechanical fragmentation between 5 and 145 times more effectively than sand (Chubarenko et al, 2020). Large organic material may also function to trap plastics on shorelines, as these often appear together in accumulation zones on shorelines, typically at the tidelines (Hoellein et al, 2014;Corcoran et al, 2017;Lazcano et al, 2020). Microplastics can adhere strongly to the surface of seaweed (Gutow et al, 2016;Sundbaek et al, 2018), such that the removal of plastic and other anthropogenic contaminants has become a standard component of pre-processing procedures in commercial seaweed aquaculture operations (Raikova et al, 2019).…”

Contrasting tourism regimes due to the COVID-19 lockdown reveal varied genomic toxicity in a tropical beach in the Southern Atlantic

“…In terms of direct effects, methodological approaches generally take behavioral, biochemical, and physiological consequences to organisms into consideration (Lamine et al, 2019 ; Lynch et al, 2019 ; Smith et al, 2021 ). For indirect effects, approaches are based on responses to different concentrations of specific contaminants or population densities of determined organisms, for example, which may vary due to tourism activities (Gül & Griffen, 2018 ; Lazcano et al, 2020 ; Soares et al, 2020 ). The unprecedented results, directly associated with tourist visitation and genomic damage in A. saxatilis presented in this study, will contribute to the understanding of the impacts of tourism on beach ecosystems.…”