Global maps of the Ocean microbiome: Concentration of microplastic in surface waters, available as monthly climatologies projected under contemporary (2005-2017) environmental and anthropogenic predictors.

This collection of global maps provides global predictions of surface monthly microplastics concentrations (in #items.km-2, log10 transformed) modelled through five distribution models (GLM, GAM, ANN, RF, GBM). The models were trained on an observational dataset that aggregated measurements from multiple microplastic sampling campaigns compiled by van Sebille et al. (2015) and completed by Schmiz (2021). The original dataset of Schmiz (2021) synthetised no less than 13 159 microplastic concentrations observations spanning from 1979 to 2019. These microplastic concentrations measurements were collected through diverse sampling methods (~83% come from plankton nets) and covered plastics particles ranging from 32µm to 20cm. Giacomo Poli (MSc student, ETH Zürich) analysed this dataset and adapted the modelling pipeline of Knecht et al., (2023) to model global surface microplastics concentrations based on five types of statistical models and an exhaustive suite of environmental and anthropogenic predictors.