Row and Tow paper ready to submit

My Sunday evening has been spent putting the finishing touches to a paper that's been six years in the making.

Back in 2020, Sue Fenton and I saw an opportunity to turn RowAround Scotland into a citizen science project. Instead of simply rowing around the Scottish coastline, volunteers from coastal rowing clubs towed specially designed nets behind their St Ayles skiffs to collect microplastic samples from nearshore waters.

What started as an idea over coffee (and a few net tests from a canoe!) grew into a nationwide project involving 54 sampling locations and hundreds of volunteer rowers.

Now, after years of fieldwork, laboratory analysis and far too many hours with spreadsheets and manuscript revisions, the paper is finally ready for submission.

The results show that microplastics are widespread in Scottish nearshore waters, but perhaps more importantly, they demonstrate that trained citizen scientists can collect robust environmental data at a national scale. As microplastic pollution continues to emerge as an environmental challenge, community-led monitoring could become an important part of how we understand and ultimately reduce plastic pollution around our coasts.

Here's hoping the next step is seeing the paper in print.