Plastic debris is widespread in freshwater ecosystems, but a rigorous assessment of its global distribution has been hindered by a lack of comprehensive and comparable data. We performed the first standardized global survey of lakes to assess the quantity and type of plastics (>250μm). We included 38 lakes located in 23 different countries distributed across five continents, spanning different environmental gra...
Conferences are ideal platforms for studying gender gaps in science because they are important cultural events that reflect barriers to women in academia. Here, we explored women's participation in ecology conferences by analyzing female representation, behavior, and personal experience at the 1st Meeting of the Iberian Society of Ecology (SIBECOL). The conference had 722 attendees, 576 contributions, and 27 sc...
The majority of microplastic research has focused on seawater, with fewer than 4% of microplasticsrelated studies occurring on freshwaters. The limited available information suggests that the abundance of microplastics in freshwaters is often as high or even higher than marine environments. However, comprehensive investigations on occurrence and fate of microplastics in freshwaters are scarce and highly fragmen...
Many zooplankton species typically exhibit diel vertical migration (DVM), where zooplankton migrate from the hypolimnion to the epilimnion of lakes at night. Zooplankton exhibit this behavior to avoid visual predators and UV radiation by remaining in the bottom waters during the day and ascending to the surface waters to feed on phytoplankton at night. However, hypoxic conditions in the hypolimnion of lakes may...