Author: Chelsea Gray

Categories
Blog OSCAR

The Plastics We Don’t Talk About

This picture is of the Mississippi Sound, a region in the Gulf of Mexico that I focused much of my research on.

Written by Monica Zaky

This is an example of the variety of microplastics that can be collected from bodies of water. Notice the diversity in shape, color, and size.

What if I told you that your facial scrub may be adding to the abundance of plastics in our rivers, lakes, and oceans? Those microbeads that exfoliate your face are often made of plastic. Plastics are everywhere. They are used for packaging, beauty supplies, agriculture, furniture, and even our cars. Sadly, a lot of plastics end up in water of some sorts; in creeks, streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans, plastics are there, and they are becoming unavoidable. Large plastics break down into tiny pieces called microplastics, or plastics that are less than 5mm in length. Microplastics may come from anything such as clothing to beauty products such as a facial scrub. How many of these plastics are in our water systems, and how might they be interacting with other pollutants in the water?

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Blog OSCAR

Microplastics and Pollutants in The Great Lakes

Written by: Mark Derco

The great lakes are the largest coalition of freshwater lakes in the world and paramount to the success of the cities that border the lakes. However, the success of the lakes depends on the cities around them. For years industry has been contributing to the pollution of the great lakes and with this research we are looking to fill a gap in knowledge that will help us track the movement of these pollutants throughout the great lakes and in other regions of the United States.

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Blog In the News OSCAR

Ecotoxicology of microplastics in the Potomac River watershed: Effects on Aquatic Organisms, Mechanisms of Fragmentation, and Vectors of Micropollutants and Microbial pathogens

Great falls
Great Falls Park. Scenic Potomac River waterfall. Photo by Maria Rumyantseva on June 19th, 2020.

Written by Maria Rumyantseva

There have been numerous discussions on the issue of water contamination, and one might ask what novelty could this project possibly bring about? Well, the pandemic summer of 2020 dictated a new twist as the faculty members as well as students must have adjusted and adapted to a new condition with resilience, enthusiasm, creativity, and flexibility. In this blog I will share my personal experience participating in the project, I will describe the research process for a meta-analysis and how we decided to attain that virtually.

Continue reading “Ecotoxicology of microplastics in the Potomac River watershed: Effects on Aquatic Organisms, Mechanisms of Fragmentation, and Vectors of Micropollutants and Microbial pathogens”
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Blog OSCAR

Microplastics: In my backyard, and probably yours, too

Caption for picture: I took this picture while visiting Eld Inlet in Puget Sound. Despite the lack of visible plastic pollution, microplastics have been documented in this urban estuary.

Written by Grace Loonam

I took this picture while visiting Eld Inlet in Puget Sound. Despite the lack of visible plastic pollution, microplastics have been documented in this urban estuary.

Initially, when considering the possibility of toxic plastic pollution, images of ominous floating garbage patches in the ocean may come to mind, as it is easy to picture how this waste could disrupt and harm aquatic life. This summer, I am working on a remote group project concerning the ecotoxicology of a less visible, but no less significant threat: microplastics. Microplastics, defined as pieces of plastic less than five millimeters in length, have become a subject of increasing interest and study, and numerous investigations targeted towards mapping their concentration and distribution in the aquatic environment have been conducted. Although my fellow researchers and I were initially planning on characterizing this issue in the Potomac River ecosystem, the need to work remotely has led us to instead analyze previous research that contains microplastic concentration data of distinct regions around the United States. We also collected pollutant data in the same regions, and I specifically looked in San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, and the Mohawk River for this information.

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Blog Education

Water Quality Data Mapping

Every year, we conduct research that helps us create a water quality “data map” of the Potomac. Here’s a video depicting what that research is like.

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Blog In the News

Hunting Creek Research

Alexandria Renew Enterprises featured our Hunting Creek research in a recent video.


RiverRenew on Vimeo.

Categories
Blog Education OSCAR

First Generation Student Turned Researcher

As a kid, Tom Hutchinson never thought he’d get to be a scientist. Hear him talk about the thrill of DNA extraction and research, all conducted while he is an undergraduate, through the Office of Student Scholarship. Tom was the very first student researcher in Dr. Jen Salerno’s lab. He continued working with her, through the Undergraduate Research Scholar Program, with Dr. Salerno as his mentor.

With the support of George Mason’s Office of Student Scholarship the PEREC team is able to provide students with unique and life-changing research experiences.

Want to know more about Tom’s research? Here’s his video from the 2020 GMU Research Symposium.

Categories
Blog Education OSCAR

Katie Russels Wins Student Excellence Award

Undergraduate Katie Russell conducted research on river herring with Dr. de Mutsert. She presented at the GMU Spring 2020 Symposium, where she was also award the OSCAR Student Excellence Award.

Categories
Blog OSCAR

Ben Rhoades Wins Student Excellence Award

Advised by Dr. Amy Fowler and Dr. Dann Sklarew, ESP undergraduate Ben Rhoades won the 2020 OSCAR Student Excellence Award for his research on microplastics in the Potomac.

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Blog

Graduate Student Awarded Boren Fellowship

Dr. Kim de Mutsert’s Graduate student, Sara Marriott, has been awarded a Boren fellowship, which will allow her to include fieldwork in the Philippines as part of her dissertation research.

From Sara:


“Boren Awards are made up of three parts, Language, Culture and Service. Through this fellowship, I will have the opportunity to travel to the Philippines for six months to study Tagalog and conduct research. My Ph.D. research is on social-ecological systems in small-scale fishery management in the Philippines, in which part of my research will be interviewing fishers and community members to better understand how community-based management practices work. Small-scale fisheries make up a large portion of unreported or under-regulated fishing and researching ways to make this sector more sustainable is important for both ecosystems and livelihoods of fishers. Finally, upon graduation, Boren Fellows are required to spend a year of service in the federal government, bringing their experiences and knowledge gained from the fellowship into US policy. This fellowship excites me because I hold stakeholder engagement as a core tenant. It is easy to just look at the numbers of fish biomass to determine impact, but in doing that I believe that you miss a large portion of the story of how and why different management/governance structures are or are not working. Having the opportunity to live in my study area working directly with fishers for six months is a dream come true in addition to enhancing my research outcomes.”

Congratulations Sara, we can’t wait to see where this takes you!