Abstract
The Galápagos Archipelago and Galápagos Marine Reserve lie 1000 km off the coast of Ecuador and are among the world's most iconic wildlife refuges. However, plastic litter is now found even in this remote island archipelago. Prior to this study, the sources of this plastic litter on Galápagos coastlines were unidentified. Local sources are widely expected to be small, given the limited population and environmentally conscious tourism industry. Here, we show that remote sources of plastic pollution are also fairly localised and limited to nearby fishing regions and South American and Central American coastlines, in particular northern Peru and southern Ecuador. Using virtual floating plastic particles transported in high-resolution ocean surface currents, we analysed the plastic origin and fate using pathways and connectivity between the Galápagos region and the coastlines as well as known fishery locations around the east Pacific Ocean. We also analysed how incorporation of wave-driven currents (Stokes drift) affects these pathways and connectivity. We found that only virtual particles that enter the ocean from Peru, Ecuador, and (when waves are not taken into account) Colombia can reach the Galápagos region. It takes these particles a few months to travel from their coastal sources on the American continent to the Galápagos region. The connectivity does not seem to vary substantially between El Ninõ and La Ninã years. Identifying these sources and the timing and patterns of the transport can be useful for identifying integrated management opportunities to reduce plastic pollution from reaching the Galápagos Archipelago.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1341-1349 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Ocean Science |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 14 Oct 2019 |
Funding
1Institute for Marine and Atmospheric research, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands 2Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, UK 3Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Oceans and Atmosphere, Hobart, TAS, Australia 4Galapagos Conservation Trust, London, UK 5College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK Acknowledgements. This work was supported through funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 715386) and the European Space Agency (ESA) through the Sea surface KInematics Multiscale monitoring (SKIM) mission science (SciSoc) study (contract 4000124734/18/NL/CT/gp). Britta Denise Hardesty is supported by CSIRO Oceans and Atmosphere. The Science to Solutions workshops were co-hosted by the University de San Francisco de Quito Galápagos Science Centre and the Charles Darwin Research Station. Some of the simulations were carried out on the Dutch National e-Infrastructure with the support of SURF cooperative (project no. 16371). This study has been conducted using EU Copernicus Marine Service Information. We thank Nicoleta Tsakali for fruitful discussion on preliminary simulations with other models in this context, and Mikael Kaandorp for providing the code for the fisheries simulation. Financial support. This research has been supported by the H2020 Research Infrastructures (TOPIOS (grant no. 715386)) and the European Space Agency (grant no. 4000124734/18/NL/CT/gp).
