Sherri A. Mason's research while affiliated with Pennsylvania State University and other places

... The increasing quantity of plastic debris in the oceans is a global concern that has seen little legislative action, despite the demonstrated harms. During the past decade, microplastics (MPs), synthetic polymers <5 mm (Arthur et al., 2009) that form from the breakdown of larger plastic debris or already exist at the small size, have received an increasing amount of attention and are the focus of emerging research (Duis and Coors, 2016;Huvet et al., 2016;Jenkins et al., 2022;Koelmans et al., 2022;Zhang et al., 2019). MPs can act as transports for invasive species (García-Gómez et al., 2021;Tumwesigye et al., 2023), alter marine biogeochemical cycles (Chen et al., 2022;Seeley et al., 2020), and can cause physical stress to organisms, through abrasion (Reichert et al., 2018) or entanglement effects (Kang et al., 2020). ...

... flood control, irrigation, recreation; Erickson et al. 2008;Allen et al. 2008) and have been important to human civilizations for over 5,000 years (Schnitter 1994). However, despite their broad utility and presence in virtually every major river in North America (Benke 1990), reservoirs have received less research attention than other aquatic systems (Kubečka et al. 2009, Guo et al. 2021. ...

... It also contributes the most to marine organisms from small zooplankton to bigger size fishes (Bessa et al., 2018;Kosore et al., 2018;Yona et al., 2020b;. Therefore, it can be concluded that fiber accounts for 90% of global microplastic particles in the marine environment as suggested by Woods et al. (2018) and Isobe et al. (2021). The method used to extract microplastic particles might also be the reason for the high dominance of fiber. ...

... Water resources have a high potential for contamination and are seriously threatened by human activities and industrial waste. Recently, concern about MPs has received global attention (Cox et al. 2021;Dusaucy et al. 2021;Galafassi et al. 2021;Wang et al. 2021;Xu et al. 2021bXu et al. , 2021bZhang et al. 2021). For example, it is estimated 1.15-2.41 million tons of plastic particles enter the oceans through rivers annually (Lebreton et al. 2017). ...

... MPs existing in several different forms, such as fibers, films, foams, or pellets, may serve as effective abiotic surfaces for microbial colonization due to their small size but bigger surface area, surface texture, hydrophobic composition, and long persistence. Recent studies have detected different forms of plastics and measured more biomass formation on MP-biofilm than on rock surfaces in river/lake environments [27,37,38]. Plastics-associated microbial communities were found to be distinctly different from those on the non-plastic substrates [39]. ...

... Generally, these microplastics are made up of PE (0.91-0.96 g cm −3 ) and PP (0.91 g cm −3 ), which are low density polymers and are mainly distributed on the water surface, as indicated by the metaanalysis performed in this study (Fig. 2), which may largely explain the concentration of these polymers for this region. 63,64 PE and PP are mainly used as sandblasting and abrasive cleaning media in consumer products, and these lakes are bounded by large population concentrations. [60][61][62]65 The resulting volumes of wastewater entering these lakes, even though treated in wastewater treatment plants (WWTP), are charged with bers and microbeads that can pass the lters of these plants due to their small sizes (<1 mm). ...

... Já os fragmentos são rígidos e extremamente diversificados quanto à forma, podendo ser redondos, subarredondados, angulares ou subangulares (Pappis et al., 2021). De modo geral, os fragmentos são resultantes da degradação e do retrabalhamento de corpos plásticos maiores, compostos principalmente por polietileno (PE) e polipropileno (PP), que são polímeros amplamente utilizados na produção de sacolas, copos plásticos e outros itens descartáveis que podem adentrar na massa d'água facilmente em função da disposição irregular de resíduos sólidos urbanos (Lenaker et al., 2019;Yang et al., 2023). ...

... Previous studies on microplastic distribution primarily employed two methods depending on the microplastic sample collection methods. One was the volume-reduced sampling method, which uses nets such as the manta trawl net and the bongo net [34,[40][41][42][43]. Another was the bulk water sampling method, in which a certain amount of seawater is collected using a bucket or an underwater pump [27,39]. ...

... 13,24,35 It is important that selectivity (e.g., size range of plastic debris captured) is documented and that data collection methods and reporting metrics are harmonized. 53,59,60 Counts data are generally used in plastics monitoring and would be relevant in this context too. Most clean-up technologies targeting macroplastics are unlikely to capture the very large items that account for the large differences in identifying the main sources of litter when using counts as compared to weights. ...

... Weathering, wave action, wind abrasion, biodegradation, and ultraviolet photodegradation cause the degradation of larger plastic particles or items such as fishing gears, textiles, plastic bags, bottles, and car tires into MPs (Alimi et al., 2018). MP has been detected in soils (Nguyena et al., 2020;van den Berg et al., 2020), sediments (Manalu et al., 2017;Bakir et al., 2020a), surface waters (Day et al., 1990;Desforges et al., 2014;), drinking water (Mason et al., 2018;Zhang et al., 2020c), agricultural food (Oliver-Conti et al., 2020;Dessì et al., 2021), and seafood fish species (Collard et al., 2017;Compa et al., 2018) (Kibria et al., 2022a(Kibria et al., , 2022b(Kibria et al., , 2022c. ...