Data presented in the paper: Does plastic waste kill mangroves? - A field experiment to assess the impact of macro plastics on mangrove growth, stress response and survival.

The aim of this dataset was to investigate how plastic waste on the forest floor and in mangrove sediment might affect mangrove trees. We first assessed the size of the current plastic waste problem in mangroves by quantifying the relatively mobile plastic fraction on the forest floor (the percentage of the forest floor covered by plastic, and the number of plastic items per square meter), and by quantifying the more immobile plastic fraction buried in the rhizospheric sediment of eight coastal mangrove fringes (plastic monitoring dataset). We subsequently investigated the effects of a range of plastic cover percentages (0%, 50% and 100%) on root growth, stress response of the tree, and tree survival of 42 mangrove trees in the field over a period of six weeks (plastic suffocation experiment dataset).

本数据集旨在探究林地与红树林沉积物中的塑料废弃物可能对红树林植株造成的影响。我们首先通过两类量化手段评估当前红树林区域的塑料废弃物污染规模：一是量化红树林林地表层相对易迁移的塑料组分，包括塑料覆盖林地的占比与每平方米塑料碎屑的数量；二是量化8处沿海红树林岸带根际沉积物中埋藏的较难迁移的塑料组分（塑料监测数据集（plastic monitoring dataset））。随后我们开展了为期六周的野外实验，设置0%、50%、100%三种塑料覆盖梯度，针对42株野外红树林植株，探究不同塑料覆盖比例对其根系生长、植株胁迫响应以及存活率的影响（塑料窒息实验数据集（plastic suffocation experiment dataset））。