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).