Abstract
Plastic pollution is an emerging driver of ecological change in coastal sediments, yet real-world ecosystem responses remain poorly understood. During a two-month in situ experiment on an intertidal sandflat in Mahurangi Harbour, New Zealand, a storm event provided a unique opportunity to test whether plastics modulate ecosystem responses to short-term environmental change. We measured sediment oxygen consumption (SOC), nutrient and N₂ fluxes, pore-water nutrient pools, and sediment organic matter in control and plastic-polluted plots across six time points spanning pre- and post-storm conditions. Plastic pollution was realised through vertical insertion of polyester nettings (6 × 2 cm, 10 µm thick, microplastic) into the sediment. Multivariate analyses revealed an interaction effect between treatment and sampling time indicating that the plastic-polluted sediments reacted differently to the storm. In control plots, the storm reduced SOC (− 24%) and pore-water NH₄⁺ (− 53%), and increased NH₄⁺ efflux (+ 186%) and NOₓ− pools (+ 166%). Compared to the storm response in the controls, the storm impact on plastic plots caused a 43% increase in SOC and a 53% increase in NH₄⁺ efflux, and lower pore-water NOₓ− (− 63%). These results demonstrate that plastics can modulate benthic ecosystem responses to storms, potentially altering nitrogen source–sink dynamics. As both plastic pollution and storm frequency intensify, such interaction effects may have growing consequences for coastal ecosystem functioning.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank our anonymous philanthropic donors, provided through the Microphytes and Microplastics project, the University of Auckland, Institute of Marine Science, Doug and Anne Hamilton for site access, and national and international collaborators, colleagues, staff and friends that have contributed to this study.
Funding
This research has been funded by anonymous philanthropic donors, provided through the Microphytes and Microplastics project, the University of Auckland, and the Institute of Marine Science.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Information. (download PDF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bartl, I., Ladewig, S. & Thrush, S. Plastic pollution shapes ecosystem response to a storm event in intertidal sediments.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-67504-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-67504-y
Keywords
- Polyester
- Climate change
- Nitrogen cycling
- Ecosystem functioning
- In situ experiment
Source: Ecology - nature.com
