Ocean cleanup

Abstract: The increase in plastics in the oceans is a major area of concern for marine biologists. In an effort to address this problem, the startup firm Ocean Cleanup is already at work collecting plastics from the ocean's surface. However, any such operation is also likely to affect ocean surface organisms. Is the net effect on ocean surface organisms benign or adverse? Matt Spencer will present a model for this effect. This is a warm-up event for the symposium in December.

The three-day symposium and workshop in December will address these issues and others with a wide array of speakers tackling tough questions.

There will be three related events over three days. The symposium will introduce and explore the issues from many perspectives, including those of proponents from environmental groups and ocean ecologists. The workshop will be a collaborative event in which we will articulate risk analyses to address those issues. These analyses will employ stochastic demography, including uncertainty propagation for abundances, vital rates, and other variables that are known imprecisely.

We believe that finding quantitative answers to the questions of whether and by how much the benefits from plastics removal outweigh the potential risks to ocean organisms, and how they compare with harms from unabated accumulation of oceanic microplastics, can only be answered by modern quantitative environmental risk analysis at the interface between engineering and ecology.

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