2023-09-20 10:03:51
The Man and Territory Association (HyT) in collaboration with the LIBERA Project, of SEO/BirdLife in alliance with Ecoembes, have presented in Huelva “MICRO”, the first website that shows the different projects and their results associated with microplastic studies in Spain.
For its development, different universities, research centers and environmental organizations have been involved in analyzing this problem that, although invisible, is already located in practically all ecosystems and environments. To this end, HyT has generated a public use tool with access to data, sampling points, tables and results, with graphic and downloadable formats.
“In water, land, air and even in fauna. Microplastics are already present everywhere, and we wanted to see this problem from another perspective: that of access to information” comments David León, project coordinator at HyT. “There are many teams working on this, we wanted to give it visibility and collect all the information we could”.
SEO/BirdLife, Vertidos Cero, Good Karma and the Universities of Alcalá, Alicante and the Autonomous University of Madrid are some of the entities that provide data to the platform in their different studies: for example, the group from the University of Alcalá has recently published a work on microplastics in the air in Madrid (the data will be on the website for anyone who wants to consult it). But there is also data from sampling on beaches, in groundwater, in sewage treatment plant sediments and even in otter excrement and other mammals associated with rivers.
“At LIBERA Project we are committed to science and dissemination, and this initiative is one of those that remained pending around microplastics, since there was no website that brought together all this information. Now, thanks to LIBERA and HyT, it already exists, and the different alliances that apply the HyT protocol for the study of microplastics, such as the Spanish Red Cross, Paisaje Limpio or ADENEX are some of those that will provide data from their work here and in turn reinforce the LIBERA network around science” says Sara Güemes, LIBERA Project coordinator at Ecoembes.
Estudiosdemicroplasticos.es has been presented at the VI International Congress of Biodiversity and Nature Conservation, Conserbio. “It seems to us to be a perfect forum for the launch of the tool, because it brings together specialists from different fields of conservation biology and many third sector entities and students.” concludes Laura Mazuecos, author of the
presentation and responsible for the implementation of the application in HyT.
HyT is responsible, among others, for the “Microplastic sampling and analysis protocol” published in 2019 and which is increasingly used by different sectors of society.
Source: HyT
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