Uma nova abordagem para investigar efeitos dos micropla ́sticos no plâncton: dos organismos a`s comunidades e funcionalidades dos ecossistemas

The main goal of Planktastic is to develop and test a new approach to investigate effects of microplastics (hereafter ‘MPs’) on planktonic organisms, communities and functioning (Fig. 1). MPs have been recognized as a contaminant of global concern, impacting wildlife and ecosystem health [21]. As MPs research increases, demonstrating their ubiquitous nature and alerting to their potential impacts, we assist to a growing overall concern about plastic pollution and an increasing public demand for solutions to tackle this new pollutant. Scientific knowledge has improved over the last years, highlighting MPs toxicity to organisms and its effects at cellular/subcellular level, although it is still unclear if MPs effects are mainly at the individual level, or if there are effects at the community level [33; 43; T1]. Understanding how MPs can alter ecological structure and processes, and ultimately compromise ecosystem services poses a great scientific and technological challenge that Planktastic aims to embrace by proposing a new solution for MPs research. Planktastic brings together an international and multidisciplinary team to pilot a new solution to advance the scientific knowledge of MPs pollution in plankton, a fundamental component of marine ecosystems, and commonly used to assess impacts of contaminants, and a recognized indicator of ecosystem integrity. Since plankton constitutes the basis of marine food webs and underpin important ecosystem services, as oxygen production and carbon sequestration, Planktastic will aim to investigate how MPs impact planktonic organisms, and also community structure and functioning. Such environmental assessments of MPs impacts are fundamental to understand the real environmental risk of these emergent contaminants, but ecological assessments require robust large field data-sets that are difficult to obtain because current surveying methods rely on intensive manual work which is time-consuming and costly effort. Planktastic aims to overcome these difficulties by promoting the collection of large data-sets through a new technological solution to detect in-situ MPs and plankton using high-resolution imaging sensors with multispectral imaging capabilities. In parallel, Planktastic will investigate biological and ecological impacts of MPs in plankton, based on field data to be collected in estuarine and coastal areas. Data collected by Planktastic will be comprised in a new open-access baseline data-set for MPs ecological assessments, fostering the construction of robust time-series data-sets suitable to be integrated in large international data-bases. Ultimately, Planktastic will produce a multi-tool framework to support environmental monitoring and management of MPs contamination that will be suitable for being used in different marine ecosystems as estuaries and coastal areas, where MPs contamination is more evident. The tools proposed in the project will enable the assessment of core information for decision makers regarding MPs impact in the ecosystems. Moreover, the framework will be suitable to be applied in on-going or new plankton and/or MPs monitoring programs and transferable for other regions/countries, promoting Ocean Observation and Digitalization strategies. The project builds upon previous work of the RT in terms of plankton ecology, MPs contamination, as well as technological approaches for autonomous plankton monitoring and plastic detection [e.g., T1-T5].