Two studies led by Oceanography Masters students have been presented at the 17th (ICS), Coastlines Under Global Change, held in Doha, Qatar earlier this month. The same studies have been published within a special edition of the Journal of Coastal Systems.
A number of Geosciences Department (Faculty of Science) staff members were co-authors in one or both of these studies, including and Dr Adam Gauci (who co-supervised both student projects), and Ms Audrey Zammit, besides Department of Statistics) and staff from the recently-established ARM (Aquatic Resources Malta).
The first study, with former student Beatrice Greiner as lead author, focused on litter collected inadvertently from the seabed, along with fish and invertebrate species, as part of the annual MEDITS (Mediterranean International Trawl Survey) survey. Her work characterised the same litter into different categories and quantified it, exploring any substantial differences between different locations. The same study concluded that sub-surface water currents play an important role in distributing such macro-litter over different parts of the seabed, with plastic items derived from households and from the tourism industry being the most commonly-collected within recorded seabed litter. A reduction in seabed litter accumulation rates was registered with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The second study, with former student Ede Kossari-Tarnik as lead author, developed an innovative adaptation of an existing piece of equipment – the so-called Manta net – which is normally used to sample microplastics at the sea surface, so as to enable the same sampling to be conducted deeper down in the water column. Ede’s work filtered large volumes of waters through the modified Manta net at the surface and at a depth of 10m, at different coastal locations, over the 2022-2023 period, concluding that the most common polymer within the collected microplastics was polyethylene, followed by acrylic and polystyrene, with the highest number of microplastics collected belonging to the 50-350 micrometres size range.
Both studies extend Malta’s marine monitoring capabilities, especially in view of onerous obligations linked with the (Marine Strategy Framework Directive).
The papers were presented in Doha by Ede and these represent the 3rd and 4th ones published this year alone, which are entirely based on research conducted by Masters students supervised by the (OMRG).
Earlier this same year, in fact, the first-ever paper on the potential impacts of ALAN on marine ecosystems, based on an MSc in Applied was published, whilst another course student – Benjamin Mifsud – within which he designed an image analysis algorithm which automatically identifies invasive alien fish species from photos submitted to citizen science campaigns.
