For British Science Week at Roehampton, we recognise the work of Professor Anne Robertson from the School of Life and Health Sciences.
Groundwater represents the largest reservoir of liquid fresh water on earth; globally 2.5 billion people exclusively depend on groundwater to meet their daily freshwater needs and groundwater ecosystems perform an essential ecosystem service in helping to keep this water clean. Like surface waters groundwaters are vulnerable to pollution by microplastics but unlike surface waters very little is known about the amount of microplastics in groundwaters and the response of the ecosystem to them.
With the funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the University of Roehampton, London (Anne Robertson, Julia Reiss, Dan Perkins and postdoctoral researcher Danielle Marchant) is leading a project to undertake the first global analysis of microplastics in groundwater ecosystems by:
- Mobilising our global network of collaborators to develop a global groundwater microplastic database.
- Identifying uptake pathways and impact of microplastics on groundwater ecosystems.
- Predicting future microplastic loadings in groundwater to inform regulation and management.
By end of 2023, using a specially designed protocol, 30 collaborators from 22 countries ranging from Australia through Europe to the United States (see Fig.1) have provided 250 samples for microplastic analysis. These samples were collected from 75 different sites, which included springs, wells and open boreholes as well as caves. Samples are being processed to extract microplastics (see workflow in Fig. 2) before analysis to determine polymer abundance and identity.
Roehampton is currently trialling a protocol for sampling groundwater food webs in the UK to understand how they are impacted by microplastics. For more information, click here.