Water Research 188 (2021) 116574

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Water Research
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/watres

“Microplastic communities” in different environments: Differences,

links, and role of diversity index in source analysis
Changchao Li a, Yandong Gan b, Chao Zhang a, Huan He a, Jiaohui Fang b, Lifei Wang a,
Yan Wang a, Jian Liu a,∗
a
Environment Research Institute, Shandong University, Qingdao 266237, China
b
School of Life Sciences, Qufu Normal University, Qufu 273165, China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Microplastics have been detected in various environments, yet the differences between microplastics
Received 28 July 2020 in different environments are still largely unknown. Scientists have proposed the concept of the “mi-
Revised 4 October 2020
croplastic cycle,” but the evidence for the movement of microplastics between different environments is
Accepted 26 October 2020
still scarce. By screening the literature and extracting information, we obtained microplastic data from
Available online 26 October 2020
709 sampling sites in freshwater, seawater, freshwater sediment, sea sediment, and soil in China. Based
on the similarity between microplastics and biological communities, here we propose the concept of a
“microplastic community” and examine the differences, links, and diversity of microplastic communi-
ties in different environments. Wilcoxon sign-ranks test, Kruskal-Wallis test, and analysis of similarities
(ANOSIM) showed that there were significant differences in abundance, proportion of small microplastics,
and community composition (shape, color, and polymer types) of microplastics in different environments.
The Mantel test showed that there were significant correlations between microplastic community com-
position in different environments. Network analysis based on community similarity further confirmed
the links between microplastic communities. The distance decay models revealed that the links weak-
ened with the increase of geographic distance, suggesting that sampling sites with closed geographical
locations had similar pollution sources and more easily to migrate or exchange microplastics. The mi-
croplastic diversity integrated index (MDII) was established based on the diversity of microplastic shape,
color, and polymer types, and its indication of the number of microplastic pollution sources was veri-
fied by the statistical fitting relationship between the number of industrial pollution sources and MDII.
Our study provides new insight into the differences and links between microplastics in different environ-
ments, which contributes to the microplastic risk assessment and demonstrates the “microplastic cycle.”
The establishment of the microplastic diversity integrated index could be used in source analysis of mi-
croplastics.
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Microplastics (plastics with a particle size < 5mm) have at-
tracted widespread attention around the world in recent years
(Rillig and Lehmann, 2020). Microplastics mainly originate from di-
rect manufacturing (i.e., primary microplastics) (Wang et al., 2019c)
and the weathering and fragmentation of larger plastics in the
environment (i.e., secondary microplastics) (Julienne et al., 2019).
Microplastics are challenging to degrade and persist in the en-
vironment (Sun et al., 2020a). The toxic effects of microplastics
on animals including fish (Akhbarizadeh et al., 2018; Ding et al.,
∗
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ecology@sdu.edu.cn (J. Liu).
2018), shellfish (Ding et al., 2020a), snails (Song et al., 2019), earth-
worms (Jiang et al., 2020a) and even their impact on microorgan-
isms (Wang et al., 2020b; Li et al., 2020a) have been confirmed.
Microplastics can also accumulate in plants (Sun et al., 2020b).
Since microplastics can be transferred step by step along the food
chain (Wong et al., 2020), they may eventually threaten human
health (Rochman et al., 2013, Blettler et al., 2018). Besides, due to
their large specific surface area and hydrophobicity, microplastics
can efficiently adsorb pollutants such as heavy metals (Zhou et al.,
2019; Turner et al., 2020), PAHs (Sharma et al., 2020), and pes-
ticides (Wang et al., 2020c) from the environment, thus forming
synergystic contamination and exacerbating the negative impacts
on the exposed organisms and the ecosystem (Zhou et al., 2020b).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2020.116574
0043-1354/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al.
Microplastics exist almost anywhere on the earth, includ-
ing the marine ecosystem (Gewert et al., 2017; Isobe et al.,
2017; Jiang et al., 2020b), freshwater systems (Yonkos et al.,
2014; Zhang et al., 2017), and terrestrial ecosystems (Rillig and
Lehmann, 2020; Sarker et al., 2020; Wong et al., 2020). The intake
of microplastics by aquatic and soil organisms can be affected by
the shape and color of microplastics (Xu et al., 2020; Zhang et al.,
2020a). Moreover, microplastics made of different polymer types
have different degrees of risk to organisms and the environment
(Xu et al., 2018; Peng et al., 2018; Li et al., 2020b). Understanding
the differences of microplastics in different environments would
be helpful for us to better evaluate the risks of microplastics, but
much remains to be done in this area.
Similar to the global biogeochemical cycles, the “microplastic
cycle” refers to the movement of microplastics between differ-
ent abiotic and biotic ecosystem compartments (Bank and Hans-
son, 2019; Rochman and Hoellein, 2020). Scientists have asked
questions about the microplastic cycle, for example: “What are
the sources of microplastics?” and “How do microplastics move
between different environments?” (Rochman and Hoellein, 2020).
Additionally, the Ocean Plastics Charter has also called for “col-
laborating on research on the sources and fate of plastics” (G7
4f 2018). However, at present, research on microplastics mostly fo-
cuses on their abundances, characteristics, or ecotoxicity (Rillig and
Lehmann, 2020). Little is known about the movement and ex-
change of microplastics between different environments, and
source analysis of microplastics is still in a preliminary stage.
Microplastics of various colors, shapes, and polymer types ac-
cumulate together in the environment, similar to a biological com-
munity (Wang et al., 2019b), so here we regard these as “mi-
croplastic communities” and study the differences, links, and diver-
sity of the communities in different environments. Due to the vast
differences in pollution exposure and physiochemical properties of
the different environments, we first hypothesized that the commu-
nity composition of microplastics would be significantly different
among different environments. Based on the concept of the mi-
croplastic cycle, we made a second hypothesis that there are links
between microplastic communities in different environments, and
the closer the geographic distance, the more similar the commu-
nity composition will be. Since the shape, color, and polymer types
of microplastics do not change significantly in the short term after
being discharged into the environment, we speculated that when
the shape, color, or polymer types of microplastics are more di-
verse, they might have more sources. Hence, we made a third hy-
pothesis that a diversity index of microplastics could indicate the
number of pollution sources. The objectives of this study were: (1)
to find the differences in the composition of microplastics between
different environments, thus providing a basis for the risk assess-
ment of microplastics; (2) to provide direct evidence for the “mi-
croplastic cycle” by studying microplastics links between different
environments and different sites; and (3) to establish a microplas-
tic diversity index and verify its usefulness as an indicator of mi-
croplastic pollution sources.
2. Methods
2.1. Data search
Five main storage reservoirs of microplastics, namely freshwater
(FW), freshwater sediment (FS), seawater (SW), sea sediment (SS),
and soil (mainly farm soil) (S), were taken as research objects to
study the differences and relationships of microplastics in differ-
ent environments. Air is also a reservoir of microplastics, but the
studies on air microplastics are still few. In order to ensure the uni-
versality and reliability of the research results, we did not take the
air environment into consideration in this study. A literature search
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Water Research 188 (2021) 116574
was carried out to list all the available peer – reviewed journal ar-
ticles published before May 2020, which considered the microplas-
tics collected from the above five environments. The databases
Web of Science and Elsevier were used for this search, and non-
English articles were excluded. The literature was screened through
the following criteria: (1) a field investigation of microplastic in at
least one of the five environments (FW, FS, SW, SS, and S); (2) for
the literature on microplastics abundance, the microplastics abun-
dances in sediment or soil were measured in terms of items per
kilogram of dry sample, or could be converted into items per kilo-
gram of dry sample, and those in water were measured in terms
of items per cubic meter, or could be converted into items per cu-
bic meter; (3) data for at least one characteristic (color, shape or
polymer type) was reported; (4) the research was carried out in
China (since we tried to establish indices that could indicate pol-
lution sources, this made it easier for us to obtain pollution source
data). After selecting the articles, we checked the citations in the
reference lists of these articles again until no further related ar-
ticles could be found. Finally, we obtained 39 studies containing
microplastics data from 709 sampling sites (FW = 283, SW = 105,
S = 88, FS = 115, SS = 118) (Fig. 1).
2.2. Extraction and processing of main data
For the selected studies, the following information was ex-
tracted: longitude and latitude of sampling sites, microplastic
abundances, particle size distribution, proportion of various colors,
proportion of various shapes, and proportion of various polymers.
Not all studies contain all the above information, but at least one
of the colors, shapes, or polymers needed to be available. After
extracting the information, we processed the data as follows: (1)
the dimension was unified as items•m−3 water or items•kg−1 dry
sediment or soil; (2) the particle sizes of the microplastics were
classified as < 1mm and 1-5mm, and the proportion of small mi-
croplastics (< 1mm) to all (i.e. < 5mm) was counted and studied;
(3) the shape types of the microplastics were divided into fiber,
fragment, film, and others (including microbead, pellet, and foam);
(4) the colors were divided into six categories, namely white, black,
blue, transparent, red and others; (5) polymer types were divided
into eleven types (including polypropylene (PP), polyethylene (PE),
polyamide (PA), polystyrene (PS), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), poly-
carbonate (PC), polyethersulfone (PES), polyethylene terephthalate
(PET), polyacrylonite (PAN), Rayon and others). When the data in
the literature could not be directly obtained through tables and
other forms, but were displayed in the form of figures, the soft-
ware ImageJ was used for physical measurement. The data involved
in this research are shown in supplementary information (Table
S1-S2; Fig. S1-S13).
2.3. Data analysis and establishment of indices
Wilcoxon and Kruskal-Wallis tests were used to compare the
differences of microplastic abundance and size among different en-
vironments. Based on the relative abundance of microplastic color,
shape, and polymer types, microplastic communities were re-
garded to study the differences and links of microplastic pollution
between different environments. Analysis of similarities (ANOSIM)
was performed to verify the statistical differences in the compo-
sition of microplastic communities in different environments. Lin-
ear discriminant analysis (LDA) was used to reduce the dimensions
of the data, and the first two axes were plotted to visually ob-
serve the differences in the composition of microplastic communi-
ties between different environments. Linear discriminant analysis
effect size (LEfSe) was used to find the characteristic microplastic
types with significant differences between different environments.
The Mantel test was used to explore the correlation of microplastic
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al. Water Research 188 (2021) 116574

Fig. 1. Distribution map of microplastic sampling sites in different environments (FW = Freshwater; SW = Seawater; S = Soil; FS = Freshwater sediment; SS = Sea sediment).
The studies involved were as follows: FW (Zhao et al., 2015; Wang et al., 2017b; Di and Wang, 2018; Xiong et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019a; Wang et al., 2019d; Zhang et al.,
2019c; Ding et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2019; Luo et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020; Mao et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2020a; Zhang et al., 2020b; Wu et al., 2020); SW
(Mai et al., 2018; Tang et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2019; Luo et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2020c; Tan et al., 2020; Qi et al., 2020); S (Liu et al., 2018; Zhou et al.,
2019; Ding et al., 2020c; Zhou et al., 2020a; Chen et al., 2020);FS (Wang et al., 2017a; Wen et al., 2018; Peng et al., 2018; Xiong et al. 2018; Ding et al., 2019; Jiang et al.,
2019; Rao et al., 2020; Yin et al., 2020; Fraser et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020a; Wu et al., 2020); SS (Zhao et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2019a; Zhang et al., 2019a; Zhang et al., 2019b;
Zheng et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2020; Fraser et al., 2020; Qi et al., 2020).

communities between different environments. Similarity between
samples was calculated based on the Bray-Curtis distance (Simi-
larity = 1 – Bray-Curtis). For the links between the samples, by
calculating the similarity of the microplastic composition between
all possible pairs of samples, the data with a similarity greater
than 0.5 was selected, and the similarity matrix of the microplas-
tic composition between the samples was constructed and visu-
alized on a network graph. The distance decay model was estab-
lished to explore the effect of increasing geographic distance on
the similarity of microplastic community (Nekola and White, 1999;
Yang et al., 2020).
We calculated the Simpson diversity index (Simpson, 1949) for
microplastics of different shapes, different colors, and different
polymers, namely Simpson-shape, Simpson-color, and Simpson-
polymer. Furthermore, the linear regression model was carried
out between each of the two pairs of the three to test the re-
liability of pollution source traceability of microplastic diversity.
Moreover, we proposed a microplastic diversity integrated index
(MDII) based on three diversity indices (Simpson-shape, Simpson-
color, and Simpson-polymer) of the microplastics to reflect the mi-
croplastic community composition and to indicate the number of
pollution sources. To test the source indicative function of MDII, we
applied linear regression analysis between the MDII of microplastic
communities in freshwater ecosystems and the number of indus-
trial pollution sources of the cities they located. The number of
pollution sources was obtained from the list of pollution sources
published on the official website of each city’s ecological environ-
mental protection bureau. We counted the number of total pollu-
tion sources, water pollution sources, air pollution sources, and soil
pollution sources. Since the pollution source data was released on

3
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al.
Fig. 2. General information of microplastics in different environments (FW = Freshwater; SW = Seawater; S = Soil; FS = Freshwater sediment; SS = Sea sediment).
A = Abundance (items•m−3 for FW and SW; items•kg−1 for FS, SS, and S), B = Percentage of small particle size (< 1 mm) microplastics, C = Shape, D = Color, E = Polymer
Type. Different lowercase letter labels represent significant differences. The numbers on the chord chart represent the proportion of the various microplastic characteristics.
a city-by-city basis , we regarded each city as a large microplastic
community. We averaged the relative abundance of microplastics
at all sampling sites in this city and then calculated the MDII of
this large microplastic community. The calculation formula of MDII
is as follows:
1/3
MDII = (Simpson_shape × Simpson_color × Simpson_polymer )
Similar to the Simpson index, MDII is between 0 and 1. The
closer the value is to 0, the lower the diversity of microplastics.
Data analyses and plotting were performed in R (version 4.0.0)
using packages vegan, MASS, ggplot2, and corrplot. The distribution
map in Fig. 1 was plotted in ArcGIS (version 10.6). The network
relationship graph was drawn in Gephi (version 0.9.2). LEfSe was
analyzed at http://huttenhower.sph.harvard.edu/galaxy.
3. Results
3.1. General information of microplastics in different environments
Significant differences exist in the abundance of microplastics in
different environments (Fig. 2A): the abundance of microplastics in
freshwater (average: 6829 items•m−3 ) was much higher than that
in seawater (average: 1320 items•m−3 ) (Wilcoxon, p < 0.0 0 01);
the abundance of microplastics in soil (average: 2e5 items•kg−1 )
was significantly higher than in freshwater sediments (average:
436 items•kg−1 ) and in sea sediments (average: 487 items•kg−1 )
(Kruskal-Wallis, p < 0.0 0 01). As shown in Fig. 2B, microplastics
with particle sizes less than 1 mm accounted for the majority,
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Water Research 188 (2021) 116574
and the proportion of small particle-sized microplastics in seawa-
ter (average: 48%) was significantly lower than in the other four
environments (average: FW = 74%, FS = 78%, S = 72%, SS = 79%)
(Kruskal-Wallis, p < 0.0 0 01). The distribution of shape, color, and
polymer types of microplastics are shown in Fig. 2C, 2D, and
2E, respectively. Overall, the proportions of various shapes of mi-
croplastics in the five environments were seen in descending or-
der as follows: fiber (61%) > fragment (26%) > film (7%) > others
(5%); In each environment, fiber (FW = 60%; SW = 59%; FS = 52%;
SS = 78%; S = 57%) and fragment (FW = 23%; SW = 35%;
FS = 26%; SS = 18%; S = 30%) were still the main microplas-
tic shapes. The color distribution of microplastics in the five en-
vironments in descending order was as follows: transparent (32%)
> black (22%) > blue (15%) > white (11%) > red (7%); The color
distribution of microplastics varied greatly in different environ-
ments, but transparent was still the main color of microplastics in
each environment (FW = 27%; SW = 57%; FS = 26%; SS = 31%;
S = 19%). PP and PE were the two main polymer types, both in
general (PP = 23%; PE = 26%) and in each environment (PP: range
from 12% to 29%; PE: range from 18% to 38%).
3.2. Differences of microplastic communities in different
environments
ANOSIM (Fig. 3A) showed that the differences in the composi-
tion of microplastic communities in different environments were
significantly greater than the differences in different sites within
the same environment (R = 0.152, p = 0.001). The first two axes of
the LDA explain 42.53% and 34.03%, respectively, of the microplas-
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al.
Fig. 3. Differences of microplastic communities based on shape, color, and polymer types in different environments. A = Analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) was used for
variance testing, and y-axis represents the dissimilarity ranks between and within environments; B = Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) was used to maximize the differences
between groups; C = LDA Effect Size (LEfSe) was used to identify characteristic microplastic types in different environments.
tic community’s variance in the five environments. It can be seen
from Fig. 3B that SW and S were significantly different from the
other communities, but the three communities of FW, FS, and SS
were not clearly distinguished on the LD1 and LD2 axes. LEfSe was
used to find the significantly discriminant microplastic types (in-
cluding shape, color, and polymer) in each environment (Thresh-
old on the logarithmic LDA score for discriminative features was
set to 4.4 to ensure that each environment had at least one char-
acteristic microplastic type). We found that, based on the relative
abundance, there were significantly more transparent microplastics
in SW, more blue microplastics in SS, more black, PP, and PE mi-
croplastics in S, more white microplastics in FW, and finally more
PET and PS in FS. These microplastic types were the characteristic
types in their respective environments (Fig. 3C).
3.3. Links between microplastic communities
The Mantel test was used to examine the relationships among
the microplastic communities in the five environments, and the re-
sults are shown in Fig.4A. There were significant positive associa-
tions (R values were between 0.28 and 0.63) between microplas-
tic communities in different environments (except for the p value
of FS and S was 0.072, all other p values were less than 0.05).
In order to study the association of the microplastic communi-
5
Water Research 188 (2021) 116574
ties among various sites, we calculated the similarity between mi-
croplastic communities based on Bray-Curtis distance, and the sim-
ilarity value was between 0 and 1. Based on the community sim-
ilarity, we drew a community relationship network (Fig. 4B). Each
node in Fig. 4B represents a microplastic community sample. If the
similarity between the two samples is greater than 0.5, a connec-
tion line is drawn between the two microplastic communities, that
is, an edge in the network. The size of the node indicates the num-
ber of edges connected with it. It can be seen from Fig. 4B that
there were complex links between the microplastic communities
in various sampling sites. The 259 nodes form 21976 sides, and the
average degree of the network was 169.699. That is to say, on av-
erage, each microplastic community had a similarity greater than
0.5 with the other 169.699 microplastic communities.
A geographic distance and community similarity (community
similarity was represented by 1 – Bray-Curtis dissimilarity dis-
tance) were calculated between each pair of microplastic commu-
nities, and a total of 9510 pairs of relationships were generated.
And then the distance decay linear models were run to examine
the effects of geographic distances on the links among the mi-
croplastic communities. As shown in Fig.5, overall, there were sig-
nificant distance decay relationships for microplastic community
similarity in the five environments (R2 = 0.297, p < 0.0 0 01). For
each environment, the distance decay models in FW, FS, SW, and
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al. Water Research 188 (2021) 116574

Fig. 4. Links between microplastic communities. A = Mantel test based on Bray-Curtis distance; B = Network analysis based on community similarity. -, ∗ , ∗∗
represents p
values less than 0.1, 0.05, 0.01, respectively.

Fig. 5. Distance decay relationships of microplastic community similarity. Solid lines indicate mean estimates, and the shaded area denotes 95% prediction intervals.

SS passed the statistical test and had a good-fitting relationship (R2
ranged from 0.151-0.431; p < 0.0 0 01), but the distance decay re-
lationship of the microplastic communities in soil was relatively
weak (p = 0.051). The slopes of the distance decay models of the
microplastic in each environment were in descending order as fol-
lows, showing the rate at which similarity decays with distance: S
(5.743e−7 ) > SS (1.487e−7 ) > FS (1.186e−7 ) > SW (1.116e−7 ) > FW
(9.234e−8 ). This result showed that the geographic location had
significant effects on the microplastic community composition, and
the similarity between microplastic communities decreased with
increasing geographic distance.

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C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al. Water Research 188 (2021) 116574

Fig. 6. Relationships between Simpson-shape, Simpson-color, and Simpson-polymer. Solid lines indicate mean estimates, and the shaded area denotes 95% prediction inter-
vals.

Fig. 7. Relationships between microplastic diversity integrated index (MDII) and the number of pollution sources. Solid lines indicate mean estimates, and the shaded area
denotes 95% prediction intervals.

3.4. The establishment and verification of the MDII as an indicator of lution sources (Fig. 7). As presumed, there were well-fitted linear
pollution sources relationships between MDII and the number of pollution sources
(R2 ranged from 0.255 to 0.486; p value of water pollution source
In order to illustrate the reliability of using microplastic com- number-MDII linear model was less than 0.1, and p values of the
munity diversity to indicate the number of pollution sources, we other three models were less than 0.05).
tested the relationships among the diversity of microplastic shape,
color, and polymer type. As shown in Fig. 6, significantly posi-
4. Discussion
tive correlations exist among Simpson-shape, Simpson-color, and
Simpson-polymer (R2 ranged from 0.215 to 0.249; p < 0.001).
4.1. Differences of microplastic communities in different environments
A comprehensive diversity index, the microplastic diversity inte-
grated index (MDII), was established to reflect the complexity of
The first scientific hypothesis of this study was verified: there
microplastics in the environment and indicate the condition of
were significant differences of microplastics in different environ-
pollution sources based on the three Simpson indices (Simpson-
ments (including seawater, sea sediments, freshwater, freshwa-
shape, Simpson-color, Simpson-polymer). Linear regression models
ter sediments, and soils), which were manifested in the differ-
between the MDII values of the microplastic communities in the
ences of abundance, proportion of small microplastics, and com-
freshwater ecosystems and the number of pollution sources (in-
munity composition (shape, color, and polymer types). Freshwater
cluding total sources of pollution, water pollution sources, air pol-
ecosystems, the major sources of seawater microplastics (Eerkes-
lution sources, and soil pollution sources) in the cities were ap-
Medrano et al., 2015; Zhao et al., 2019), were more easily and
plied to verify the ability of MDII to indicate the number of pol-
directly affected by various pollution sources and human activi-

7
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al.
ties (Rachman, 2018). Therefore, the concentration of microplastics
in the freshwater ecosystem was significantly higher than that in
the seawater ecosystem. In addition, the volume of the ocean was
much larger than that of any freshwater ecosystem, resulting in
the rapid dilution of microplastics discharged into seawater, which
was also an important reason for the lower concentration of mi-
croplastics in the seawater. We found that the abundance of mi-
croplastics in soil was significantly higher than that in freshwa-
ter sediments and seawater sediments. Most of the soil samples
involved in this study were farm soil, and the other parts were
woodland and vacant land. The main reasons for the significantly
high concentration of microplastics in soil might be as follows:
extensive application of sewage sludge in farmland (Zubris and
Richards, 2005), the fragmentation and weathering of plastic film
(plasticulture), domestic garbage, plastic litter and plastic items in
landfills (Rachman, 2018), and wastewater irrigation (Sarker et al.,
2020). As small microplastics are more likely to accumulate in
organisms (Feng et al., 2020), it is generally believed that the
smaller the particle size of microplastics, the higher the harm to
the ecosystem (Gebhardt and Forster, 2018). The proportion of mi-
croplastics with small particle size (< 1 mm) in seawater is sig-
nificantly lower than that in the other four environments (FW,
FS, SS, and S), the reason might be that seawater ecosystem has
less promotion effect on the decomposition or the fragmentation
of microplastics. This also makes the risk of microplastics lower
in the seawater ecosystem than in the other four environments
(Li et al., 2019b; Li et al., 2020a). Less mechanical wear and limited
UV penetration might be the main reason for the low degradation
of microplastics in seawater (Wang et al., 2017a; Erni-Cassola et al.,
2019). The significant differences in microplastic community com-
position (shape, color, and polymer types) in different environ-
ments suggest corresponding differences in the main pollution
sources faced by those environments. For example, the breaking
and weathering of fishing lines and nets could produce a large
amount of transparent microplastics (Di and Wang, 2018), and in-
tensive fishing activities in coastal areas could be why transparent
microplastic was the representative microplastic type in seawater;
the significant amount of black microplastics in soil might come
from automobile tire wear (Ding et al., 2020b), while the signifi-
cant amount of PP and PE in soil is likely caused by the widespread
use of plastic films in tillage (Ramos et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2018).
4.2. Links between microplastic communities
The significant positive correlation between the microplastic
community composition matrices in different environments and
the complex microplastic community similarity network of mi-
croplastic communities in various sampling sites supported our
second scientific hypothesis that there were close associations be-
tween microplastic communities. These associations also indicated
the movement of microplastics between different large compart-
ments, including freshwater ecosystems such as rivers, marine
ecosystems, and terrestrial habitats (Rillig and Lehmann, 2020),
providing direct evidence for the concept of the “microplastic cy-
cle” (Bank and Hansson, 2019; Rochman and Hoellein, 2020). The
main reasons for the correlation of the microplastic composition
matrix in the five environments in this study might be: firstly,
shared pollution sources or similar pollution sources could result
in similar microplastic compositions (Wang et al., 2019b); sec-
ondly, the microplastics in the water body could sink to sedi-
ment, and sediments were both sinks and sources of microplastics
(Wang et al., 2019a; Li et al., 2020a; Su et al., 2020); thirdly, irri-
gation could cause microplastics in freshwater bodies such as river
water to enter and stay in farmland soil; lastly, freshwater bod-
ies such as rivers were important microplastic sources for the ma-
rine ecosystem (Eerkes-Medrano et al., 2015; Lebreton et al., 2017;
8
Water Research 188 (2021) 116574
Siegfried et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2019). It is worth noting that the
Mantel test based on sample similarity, used to test the correla-
tion of microplastic composition matrix in our study, might have
potential for source analysis of microplastics.
The distance decay relationship of microplastics composition
similarity showed that the links between microplastic communi-
ties weaken with the increase of geographic distance. This sug-
gested that: firstly, the sampling sites close to each other had sim-
ilar pollution sources, even shared the same sources; secondly,
the “microplastic communication” (including migration and ex-
change) was more likely to occur between the sampling sites close
to each other, such as being transported by wildlife like earth-
worms (Rillig et al., 2017; Rachman, 2018) and being transferred
by dry and wet (e.g., rain, snow) deposition from the atmosphere
(Dris et al., 2016; Rochman and Hoellein, 2020).
4.3. Reliability of MDII as an indicator of the number of pollution
sources
Many studies have speculated about the pollution sources of
microplastics via the color, shape, or polymer types of the mi-
croplastics (Ó Briain et al., 2020; Li et al., 2020a). It has also been
suggested that rich colors represent a large number of sources
(Zhu et al., 2020) and diverse shapes and polymer types of mi-
croplastics indicate a wide range of sources (Wang et al., 2019b).
Therefore, the relationship of the microplastic diversity to the
number of pollution sources is credible. The remarkable linear
positive correlation among color diversity, shape diversity and
polymer-type diversity of microplastics verified the reliability of
using the diversity index as an indicator of pollution sources. In-
tegrating the three diversity indices, the MDII was established to
reflect the diversity of microplastic community and to indicate the
complexity of the pollution sources. Studying freshwater ecosys-
tems is the suitable for elucidating the sources of microplastic pol-
lution because these ecosystems are exposed directly to pollution
sources in cities and directly receive the treated and untreated ur-
ban and industrial wastes (Rachman, 2018), moreover, industrial
emissions were usually the main sources of microplastic in fresh-
water (Lechner et al., 2014). Therefore, we used the MDII of the
microplastic communities in freshwater ecosystem and the num-
ber of industrial pollution sources in the city to verify the ability
of MDII to indicate the number of pollution sources. The statis-
tically significant fits between them validated our third hypothe-
sis: the diversity index of microplastics could indicate the num-
ber of pollution sources. In fact, both the number and the dis-
tribution uniformity of microplastic types were considered in the
calculation process of MDII. So, in addition to the number of pol-
lution sources, the MDII of a microplastic community is also af-
fected by the distance from the pollution source and the pollu-
tion source’s emission intensity. Therefore, when the MDII value
of microplastics in a specific place is very high, we can specu-
late that there are multiple microplastics pollution sources in the
place, and the contributions of each source, or the most essential
sources, are equivalent. In contrast, when the MDII value is very
low, in addition to having few pollution sources, another reason is
that one or a few sources make a dominant contribution to the
area, thus leading to a decrease in the uniformity of microplastics.
Previous studies have also tried to calculate the diversity of mi-
croplastics and to speculate on the pollution sources of microplas-
tics (Wang et al. 2019b; Zhou et al. 2019). Zhou et al. (2019) calcu-
lated the polymer richness and diversity of microplastics by using
the polymer types of microplastics. Wang et al. (2019b) divided mi-
croplastics into ten categories through literature review, and based
on this, calculated the diversity of microplastics to reflect the com-
plexity of microplastics pollution sources. They all affirmed the in-
dicative function of microplastic diversity on microplastic pollu-
C. Li, Y. Gan, C. Zhang et al.
tion sources. However, they did not fully consider the character-
istics of microplastics, and the source indicative function of the in-
dex has not been tested. In this study, the color, shape and poly-
mer information of microplastics were comprehensively considered
when establishing the diversity index, and the indicative function
of microplastic diversity on pollution sources was fully verified.
Since that the research on source analysis of microplastics has just
started (Rochman and Hoellein, 2020), the MDII index may make
important contributions to subsequent extensive source analysis.
4.4. Limitations and perspectives
Although we have tried to make our data and results rigorous
and reliable, limitations remain. Firstly, due to the begnning of re-
search on microplastics and the inconsistent sampling methods of
microplastics at present, we did not take the uniform minimum
detection limit of microplastics as a criterion for screening data.
Secondly, although air is also a reservoir of microplastics, there is
still too little research on air microplastics to get a universal con-
clusion, so we did not regard the air microplastics as one of the
research objects in this study. Finally, the microplastic diversity in-
dex established in this study can indicate the number of pollu-
tion sources. The pollution sources here only refer to the pollution
sources discharging few kinds of microplastics. In the future, it is
urgent to develop a unified microplastic research method and air
microplastics need to be widely studied. The microplastic diversity
integrated index we proposed is welcome to be widely tested, and
more source analysis of microplastics is needed.
5. Conclusion
By integrating and analyzing research data on microplastics in
five environments (freshwater, seawater, freshwater sediment, sea
sediment, and soil), we found that there were significant differ-
ences in microplastics in different environments, which were man-
ifested in abundance, proportion of small particle size microplas-
tics, shape composition, color composition, and polymer composi-
tion. Moreover, the Mantel test showed significant positive asso-
ciations between microplastics composition in different environ-
ments and network analysis further confirmed the links between
microplastic communities both in different sampling sites and in
different environments. Furthermore, the distance decay models
showed that these links weakened with increasing geographic dis-
tance. The significant positive correlations among the diversity in-
dices of shape, color, and polymer types provided the prerequi-
site for indicating the number of pollution sources through the
diversity of microplastics. A comprehensive index, the microplas-
tic diversity integrated index (MDII), was established based on
the Simpson-shape, Simpson-color, and Simpson-polymer indices
to reflect the diversity of microplastics and to indicate the num-
ber of microplastic pollution sources. The statistical fitting rela-
tionship between the number of industrial pollution sources and
MDII verified the ability of MDII to indicate the number of pollu-
tion sources. Our study fills the research gap in the difference of
microplastic assemblies in different environments and provides a
basis for the risk assessment of microplastics. Our research on the
links between microplastics in different environments provides ev-
idence for the “microplastic cycle” and the establishment of MDII
contributes to the source analysis of microplastics.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.
9
Water Research 188 (2021) 116574
Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the “National Key R&D Program
of China” (No. 2017YFC0505905) and the “National Natural Science
Foundation of China” (No. 32071523). We are grateful to Dr. Pamela
Holt for polishing the language of our article.
Supplementary materials
Supplementary material associated with this article can be
found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.watres.2020.116574.
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