Identifying Marine Sources of Beached Plastics Through a Bayesian
Framework: Application to Southwest Netherlands
Abstract
Beaches are thought to contain a large part of plastics entering the
marine environment. Here, they can cause harm to biota, and can
potentially break down into smaller fragments over time. To protect
vulnerable beaches, it is advantageous to have information on the
sources of this plastic. Here, we develop a universally applicable
Bayesian framework to map sources for plastic arriving on a specific
beach, applied to a beach in southwest the Netherlands. In this
framework, we combine Lagrangian backtracking simulations of drifting
particles with data of plastic input from coastlines, rivers and fishing
activity. This facilitates spatiotemporal source attribution for plastic
arriving at the specified beach. We show that the main sources are the
east coast of the UK, the Dutch coast, the English channel (fisheries)
and the Thames, Seine, Rhine and Trieux (rivers). We also show that
particle age is a major uncertainty in source attribution using
backtracking.