Fig. 2

Unadjusted (blue) and rescaled (1 to 5000 μm; red) aqueous microplastics concentrations in SFB for A) aquatic matrices, B) sediment, and C) fish. Data are presented as box and whisker plots, with the center lines representing the median values (50th percentiles), while the box contains the 25th to 75th percentiles. The whiskers mark the 5th and 95th percentiles, and values beyond those upper and lower bounds are considered outliers, marked with dots. All monitoring data were rescaled for size using matrix-specific PDFs derived for SFB and were corrected for plastic proportions due to spectroscopic subsampling. Manta trawl data were further corrected to account for systematic removal of fibers from blank-corrected data in Zhu et al. [70]. For each matrix, sampling apparatus are defined in parentheses