Carolin Müller
Report of GLOMAR PhD student Carolin Müller about her participation in the 3rd International Conference on Plastic Pollution from MACRO to nano (MICRO) - online from 23 to 27 November 2020
From 23rd to 27th November 2020, I participated in the MICRO2020 international conference on plastic pollution. The third edition of this biennial conference took place online and hosted a community of more than 2000 authors and featured around 500 communications; one of them being the oral presentation of my field study on microplastic exposure and uptake by juvenile white seabream Diplodus sargus in the Ria Formosa lagoon, which I collaboratively work on for my PhD project with a team of scientists from CCMAR in Faro, Portugal.
All presentations had to be pre-recorded and submitted prior to the conference – due to the dense 1-week programme, each contribution was not longer than 7 minutes plus additional time for discussions after the screening. Though this online event was less interactive than an in-person conference would have been, the atmosphere was still very welcoming, and everyone tried to engage and connect as vividly as possible after all these interesting research insights. At the same time, this online event may have enabled many (early career) scientists to contribute and participate who otherwise may have not been given the opportunity to travel to Lanzarote due to busy schedules or lack of funding. Nevertheless, I hope MICRO2022 will again be held in-person (or as a hybrid event) and many of us ‘plastic’ scientists will be able to share our research with interested peers and parties!