Over the summer of this year RowAroundScotland, a project run by the Scottish Coastal Rowing Association and being support by 2020 Coasts & Waters was meant to be happening as rowing clubs prepare their boats across Scotland to get ready to row around Scotland, each doing their own leg of the route.
This is the route that the boats were going to take around Scotland! Each leg was going to be completed by the local rowing groups.
And yep...we're wearing the same jacket (not sure whose smells worse haha)!
Yep if you haven't already thought what I had...what a great chance to do some science?! Yep that's what Sue Fenton also thought when she asked SAMS to be involved.
So my link to this project is that I'm good friends with Mairi Fenton who is Sues', daughter. Mairi was marine assistant at Rothera a few years before me...but we didn't meet until we were back in Scotland through mutual BAS friends! We are hoping to write up this rowing project into a research paper when it's finished...but first, you ask what is the project?
As I had researched microplastics at Rothera, we thought this is a great opportunity to get some community-led, citizen science microplastic data whilst the boats make their way around Scotland. You can read more on their website here too.
The aim: to assess microplastics in waterways and around the coast of Scotland during the RowAround Scotland 2020
I designed this modified LADI net which could be towed behind the rowing boats, Millport kindly built it for us! My friends at Highwater sails down in Plymouth kindly donated the rip stock and rope!
There are no papers that I can find on collecting microplastics from rowing boats but instead, there's a great one completed from a paddleboard!
So the objectives are to collect microplastic samples around Scotland to get a current assessment of microplastic abundance
I gave a talk at one of the meetings that were being used to organise the project! People from all over Scotland joined from their local rowing clubs to test their navigation and also for me to explain how they were going to collect their microplastic samples. Everyone was super keen and regularly complete beach cleans whilst out and about rowing.
So just a reminder that microplastics are small particles ranging from 1µm to 5mm (Steer et al. 2017).
Microplastics include fragments of larger plastic items that have broken into smaller pieces by the effect of waves and sediment abrasion, and degradation in sunlight, among other processes (Thompson, 2015).
The country’s coastal waters are important breeding and foraging areas for a wide range of marine species and there is relatively little published information on their distribution in the waters around Scotland. The results from this study will present the status of microplastics around Scotland’s Coast and build on the data from Green Peace & Marine Scotland about microplastics around Scotlands coasts and inland waterways.
Sue and I had a fantastic lunchtime at SAMS just before lockdown from my friend's canoe 🛶, where we tested out the net!
The LADI net was tested in the
Marine Institute (MUN) flume tank when they built it and you can see the design does not deflect the flow out, but in and through the net so capture a big surface area as you move the rowing boat through the water.
When we get the samples back after or during the event we will be analysing them at the Scottish Association of Marine Science on our state of the art FTIR machine. This will also be part of a student research project!
"Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy is a technique used to obtain an infrared spectrum of absorption or emission of a solid, liquid or gas. An FTIR spectrometer simultaneously collects high-spectral-resolution data over a wide spectral range." This is how will use the instrument to analyse the samples and identify the polymer of the microplastics found.
We have a big database of microplastics integrated onto the machine that helps to identify the plastic found in the sample. From the sample we collected on the canoe, we scarily managed to identify some microplastics and that was after only 10 minutes of rowing!
So next summer, hopefully, this event will go ahead and we will get some interesting citizen science data.
If you're interested this is the paper that I published on microplastics around the research base in Rothera & the write-up BAS did about it. More about microplastics in the next blog!
