Can we investigate microplastic pollution with school students? Experiences from eight years of citizen science research

Microplastic research is challenging, especially so in a citizen science context, where contamination prevention measures, the small size of particles and tedious microplastic separation and sorting processes complicate the involvement of participants. On this poster we share how we involved school students and their teachers in microplastic research within the citizen science program Plastic Pirates. The Plastic Pirates were inaugurated in 2016 and since then have involved more than 24.000 participants and the program has been extended to other European countries besides Germany. The school students were mainly involved in data and sample collection and preliminary analysis. On this poster, we will give an overview over the Plastic Pirates data quality and management mechanisms used over the last eight years of this program. Based on our experience we recommend for example to focus investigation on the larger fraction of microplastics, to develop data quality mechanisms that do not obstruct the work of the school students in the field and describe how we developed transparent criteria to communicate shortcomings to be able to publish results in peer-reviewed literature.