AI Article Synopsis
- The study addresses the challenges of analyzing microplastic pollution by proposing a protocol to determine the necessary sample size for accurate representation of microplastic characteristics.
- Based on data from the Tara Mediterranean campaign, the findings indicate that analyzing just 3% of collected microplastics can provide a reliable understanding of the overall distribution in the North West Mediterranean Basin, with an error margin under 5%.
- Additionally, analyzing 17.7% of samples allows for a more detailed overview, with a margin of error under 10%, highlighting the potential practical benefits of this approach in microplastic research.
Article Abstract
The study of microplastic pollution involves multidisciplinary analyses on a large number of microplastics. Therefore, providing an overview of plastic pollution is time consuming and, despite high throughput analyses, remains a major challenge. The objective of this study is to propose a protocol to determine how many microplastics must be analyzed to give a representative view of the particle size distribution and chemical nature, and calculate the associated margin error. Based on microplastic data from Tara Mediterranean campaign, this approach is explained through different examples. In this particular case, the results show that only 3% of the collected microplastics need to be analyzed to give a precise view on the scale of the North West Mediterranean Basin (error <5%), and 17.7% to give an overview manta per manta (error <10%). This approach could be an important practical contribution to microplastic studies.
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Source |
|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6370211 | PMC |
| http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212088 | PLOS |
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