IMIS - Marine Onderzoeksgroepen

The present dataset supports the manuscript “Microplastic burdens and trophic transfer patterns differ between marine and freshwater metawebs”. It contains 586 organismal microplastic-burden observations compiled from 284 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025. The observations comprise 433 marine and 153 freshwater records from 294 harmonised sampling locations worldwide, spanning approximately 80°S–78.9°N and 175°W–178.2°E.

The observations cover 50 Marine Ecoregions of the World marine provinces and 52 Freshwater Ecoregions of the World freshwater ecoregions. Taxonomic coverage includes 295 accepted taxon names across eight phyla and 15 ecological groups, including fishes, bivalves, crustaceans, gastropods, zooplankton, cephalopods and aquatic vertebrates.

The primary measurement is mean organismal microplastic burden in particles individual⁻¹, accompanied by standard deviations where available, sample type, sampling location, taxonomy and ecological traits. The package also contains freshwater and marine metaweb node and edge tables, documented and predicted predator–prey interactions, residual logBMF values, 5,646 classified three-node motif instances, frozen figure inputs and R scripts for reproducing the figures.