Fig 1.
Beach plastic debris on Caribbean islands.
Examples of macroplastics and other debris on islands from a) Abaco, The Bahamas (Dec 2017); b) Barahona, Dominican Republic, Hispaniola (Nov 2016) (photos by JF).
Fig 2.
Locations of sampled beaches on the island of Oahu, Hawai`i, USA, with inset map showing each beach on the windward side of Oahu: Kahuku, Sherwoods, Kalama, Lanikai, Kaiona, Makapu′u.
Fig 3.
Images of A) high and storm tide lines at Kahuku Beach; and B) sampling top 2 cm sand in quadrats at Lanikai Beach.
Fig 4.
Distribution of microplastic density in transects.
Interaction plot showing the distribution of the number of plastic particles (m-2) in quadrats for tide line types (N = 54 quadrats per type), and beach (N = 18 quadrats per beach), with the lines connecting the means for each group.
Table 1.
Analysis of variance of plastic particle density* between tidelines and beaches.
Fig 5.
Sand texture on beaches sampled.
Percentage composition of sand grain size classes for six beaches arranged from those with more than 30% fine textured sand (Kalama, Lanikai), to those dominated by medium and coarse sands (Kahuku).
Fig 6.
Microplastics size distribution on beaches sampled.
Percentage composition of microplastic size classes for six beaches.