Nautilos field experiment in the University of Bergen

NIVA had the opportunity to demonstrate the use of the smartphone plastic NIR scanner along with other shoreline sampling techniques to students from the University of Bergen during 19-20 April 2023. The students were part of either a bachelor or a master’s program at the University of Bergen and they also included 2 Erasmus students. The field training course was held over two days at the Research Station at Espeland, where the students took both field work and lectures. The students were tasked to design their own field experiment and they collected macro-, meso- and micro-plastics from exposed and non-exposed beaches around the Research Station at Espeland. Meso- and micro-plastic were isolated from beach sediment samples in the laboratory using density separation methods with seawater. The students used the NIR-scanner developed within Nautilos to characterize the collected plastics and counted the number of items found to display the differences among the beaches.