About Plastic Pollution in Terrestrial Systems

Introduction: Plastic pollution research has largely focused on marine ecosystems. Yet, most plastic pollution originates on land and terrestrial systems are considerably impacted by plastic pollution. Understanding the transport, fate, and effects of plastics in terrestrial systems (including aquifers, lakes, rivers, soil, plants, and animals) is thus critical for a holistic evaluation of the production, use, and recycling of plastics from individual to global scale.

Challenges: Robust tools for the quantification and characterization in heterogeneous environmental samples are being actively developed with new insights gained every day. Open science practices and open data are becoming common strategies for harmonizing and reproducing plastic pollution research, but both need further improvement by putting them closer to the front of the peer review process.

Aims: This collection, running on F1000Research with a linked Open Research Europe collection for Horizon beneficiaries, aims to collate original research articles, technical, data, and software notes, reviews, and commentaries covering novel method developments and validations, exposure and effect studies, fate and transport research, and modeling in terrestrial plastic pollution research. We highly encourage the use of open source software, open science practices, and publishing raw data and code in an open access repository for reproducible data analysis.

Researchers have the choice of publishing on the F1000Research platform or on our partner platform, Open Research Europe, which is available to Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe beneficiaries. Information on article processing charges (APCs) for publishing in F1000Research can be found here; for authors publishing in Open Research Europe all APCs are covered centrally by the European Commission.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

• Fate and effects of plastics in the terrestrial environment including terrestrial organisms, rivers, lakes, snow, glaciers, or ice
• Fate of plastics on topsoil and in the soil column
• Transport of plastics in or to adjacent limnic systems
• Use and consequences of plastics in agriculture
• Novel methods for the quantification and characterization of microplastics, macroplastics, nanoplastics, and aged or weathered plastics in heterogeneous environmental matrices
• Novel modeling and data processing approaches in terrestrial plastic pollution research

Keywords: plastic pollution, plastic debris, microplastics, nanoplastics, soil, agriculture, open data, open science, open source, rivers

Any questions about this collection? Please contact: research@f1000.com

Thumbnail image: Microplastics Under Microscope © Grace Pooley Deans, 2023. The advisors and F1000 are grateful to the artist for the permission to use this image.