Zara Botterell

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Postdoctoral reseacher at University of Exeter

Plastic pollution is now considered globally ubiquitous, irreversible, and a planetary boundary threat. Solutions are urgently needed but their development and application are hampered by the complexity and scale of the issue. System dynamics is a technique used to understand complex behaviours of systems through model building and is useful for co...

The Eastern Tropical and South-Eastern Pacific region is of global biodiversity importance. At COP26, the governments of Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Ecuador committed to the expansion of existing MPAs to create a new Mega MPA, safeguarding the Eastern Tropical Pacific Marine Corridor. It offers a profound step forward in conservation efforts...

Zooplankton are a key group of organisms at the base of the marine food web and are fundamental to providing a broad range of societal and economic benefits which have previously remained poorly defined. This research addresses this knowledge gap through the provision of a first full assessment of zooplankton ecosystem services and disservices. Ant...

Citizen science is now commonly employed to collect data on plastic pollution and is recognised as a valuable tool for furthering our understanding of the issue. Few studies, however, use citizen science to gather information on water-borne plastic debris. Here, citizen scientists adopted a globally standardised methodology to sample the sea-surfac...

Some of the highest microplastic concentrations in marine environments have been reported from the Fram Strait in the Arctic. This region supports a diverse ecosystem dependent on high concentrations of zooplankton at the base of the food web. Zooplankton samples were collected during research cruises using Bongo and MOCNESS nets in the boreal summ...

Plastic litter is found everywhere. Walk onto any beach around the world and you will almost certainly find plastic. The harm that large plastic litter can cause to marine animals is well-known; for example, you may have seen sad pictures of turtles eating plastic bags or seals tangled in discarded fishing nets. However, scientists are also concern...

With over a century of records, we present a detailed analysis of the spatial and temporal occurrence of marine turtle sightings and strandings in the UK and Ireland between 1910 and 2018. Records of hard-shell turtles, including loggerhead turtles (Caretta caretta, N = 240) and Kemp's ridley turtles (Lepidochelys kempii, N = 61), have significantl...

The underlying mechanisms that influence microplastic ingestion in marine zooplankton remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate how microplastics of a variety of shapes (bead, fiber, and fragment), in combination with the algal-derived infochemicals dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP), affect the ingestion rate of micr...

Microplastics are abundant and widespread in the marine environment. They are a contaminant of global environmental and economic concern. Due to their small size a wide range of marine species, including zooplankton can ingest them. Research has shown that microplastics are readily ingested by several zooplankton taxa, with associated negative impa...

Entanglement in anthropogenic debris poses a threat to marine wildlife. Although this is recognised as a cause of marine turtle mortality, there remain quantitative knowledge gaps on entanglement rates and population implications. We provide a global summary of this issue in this taxon using a mixed methods approach including a literature review an...

Anthropogenic (man-made) noise is a global problem in aquatic and terrestrial environments. In the shallow seas around many countries, including the UK, large windfarms are being constructed using pile driving to create a solid base for the turbines. Offshore pile driving creates pulsating noises and vibrations of very high intensities, which has b...