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PLASTYX: Microplastics in groundwater ecosystems: a global impact analysis
Project lead: Professor Anne Robertson
The total quantity, spatial distribution, residence time scales and most importantly the impact of microplastics on groundwater ecosystems, and the vital services they provide to humans, are completely unknown. There is a vital need to investigate the role of groundwater as a long-term sink for plastic pollution, including their legacy risks and impacts on the largest freshwater ecosystems on earth.
Work Package 3: Effects of microplastics on groundwater food webs
Rationale
In surface ecosystems, microplastic ingestion and response can
be highly heterogeneous, and dependent on particle characteristics such as size. Impacts on groundwater taxa could differ and maybe greater because they have low metabolic rates due to the challenging groundwater conditions. The nature of these differences and the potential implications for the functioning, stability and resilience of groundwater food webs and the ecosystem services that they deliver are unknown.
Research Question
How do microplastics propagate through, and effect the functioning and resilience of, groundwater food webs? Does this change with microplastic concentration?
Objective
Establish how microplastics change the functioning and resilience of groundwater food webs.
Methods
Using microcosms and ecological modelling we will determine the longer term impact of microplastics on food web properties such as community biomass, and on network stability, across a gradient of present and future microplastic concentrations. This will allow us to understand how microplastics propagate through, and effect the functioning and resilience of, groundwater food webs and thus the ecosystem services that they deliver. We will investigate how feeding characteristics of groundwater consumers are impacted by present and future microplastic concentrations using a microcosm approach to construct functional response curves. As groundwater animals rarely reproduce in the laboratory, we will infer the effects of microplastics on their growth rates by investigating potential mismatches between metabolic demands and energy intake during feeding in the presence of microplastics using respiration rates as a proxy. We will construct food webs using the global dataset from WP1 and parameterize a bioenergetic model of population growth and explore network dynamics across gradients of present and future microplastic concentrations over 50, 100 and 200 years linking with future groundwater microplastic pollution scenarios derived in WP 4.
Work Package lead
Dr Dan Perkins
daniel.perkins@roehampton.ac.uk
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