The streaming of plastic in the Mediterranean Sea

Data relative to the article The streaming of plastic in the Mediterranean Sea (Baudena et al., 2022, Nature Communications; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30572-5).

The dataset contains the crossroadness and plastic crossroads maps, the detailed origin of the plastic debris intercepted by the plastic crossroads, the plastic sources distribution, as well all the data necessary to produce the figures of the Main Text and Supplementary Note (e.g. Fig1.nc file contains all the data used to produce Figure 1).

For further information, or report any eventual issue, please feel free to contact alberto.baudena@gmail.com

Specific files:

Origin_Particles_Intercepted.csv contains a list of the first 1000 plastic crossroads in ranking importance. For each plastic crossroad, we list: the percentage of particles intercepted, the percentage of particles intercepted which were released by cities, rivers, and vessels. Starting from column 8, we reported the percentage relative to all the 185 coastal cities and the 200 river mouths separately, as well as the six different Mediterranean subbasins (for particles released from vessels). City names are included in column headers. River coordinates are reported in Origin_Particles_Intercepted_RiverCoordinates.csv

PlasticSources_Cities/Rivers/Vessels_with_ReleaseProbability contain the position of the plastic sources used to release virtual particles in the Mediterranean, as well as the release probability of each single location. Note that the sum of the release probability of all the cities is 0.5, of all the rivers 0.3, and all the vessels is 0.2, according to pC, pR, and pV values used in the main text.

The vessel release probability was obtained from the 2015 shipping density calculated by Lin et al., (2017; doi:10.1017/S0373463316000345)