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PROJECT

Description of the project

Acronym
TOPIOS
Title
Tracking Of Plastic In Our Seas
Summary
This project will make breakthroughs towards closing the plastic budget by creating a novel comprehensive modelling framework that tracks plastic movement through the ocean. Building on well-established previous work to follow generic water parcels through hydrodynamic ocean models, this project will modify these ‘virtual’ parcels to represent pieces of plastic by, for the first time, simulating fragmentation, sinking, beaching, wave-mixing and ingestion by biota. The new parameterisations that underpin this modelling will be based on field data and new coastal flume wave tank lab experiments. The simulated plastic particles will be tracked within state-of-the-art hydrodynamic ocean models, in order to compute maps of pathways and transports around our oceans and on coastlines and in biota. This numerical modelling will be used to evaluate a broad suite of scenarios and test hypotheses, including where the risk to marine biota is greatest. The results from this project will inform policymakers and the public on which countries, for example, are responsible for which part of the plastic problem, crucial for mitigation and legal frameworks. It will also inform engineers on where and how to best invest resources in mitigating the problem of plastic in our ocean.
Start year
2017
End year
2022
Funding programme
Horizon 2020
Programme Scope
European
Coordinator institution
Utrecht University
Coordinator email
E.vanSebille@uu.nl
Coordinator country
Netherlands
Other institutions involved
- Imperial College of Science Technology and Medecine - Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya
Other countries involved
United Kingdom
Spain
Project Budget (in euros)
1,484,760
Website
http://topios.org
Other relevant information
Funding Programme: H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
Number of Resources
13