Current graduate student Aaron Ridall, FSU Dept of Biology undergraduate Emily Farrar, former FSU Dept of Biology undergraduate Morgan Dansby, and FSUCML faculty member Dr. Jeroen Ingels, recently published their work on the influence of wastewater treatment plants and water input sources on size, shape, and polymer distributions of microplastics in St. Andrew Bay, Florida, USA. It tells the story of how damage to urban infrastructure in the St. Andrew Bay estuary has affected the local waterways. While microplastics pollution is not a new research topic in the United States, studies that assess microplastics within marine sediments are still quite rare, and this work represents one of the only microplastics studies within the state of Florida. Understanding the complexity of microplastics pollution in this system may help inform localized conservation efforts, especially as global climate change heightens the scale of tropical storms that affect coastal environments like St. Andrew Bay.

Read paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0025326X22012346