No effect of realistic concentrations of polyester microplastic fibers on freshwater zooplankton communities

Zooplankton are a conduit of energy from autotrophic phytoplankton to higher trophic levels, and they can be a primary point of entry of microplastics into the aquatic food chain. Investigating how zooplankton communities are affected by microplastic pollution is thus a key step towards understanding ecosystem-level effects of these global and ubiquitous contaminants. Although the number of studies investigating the biological effects of microplastics has grown exponentially in the last decade, the majority have used controlled laboratory experiments to quantify the impacts of microplastics on individual species. Given that all organisms live in multi-species communities in nature, here we use an outdoor 1130L mesocosm experiment to investigate the effects of microplastic exposure on natural assemblages of zooplankton. We endeavored to simulate an environmentally relevant exposure scenario by manually creating ~270,000 0.015mm x 1-1.5mm polyester fibers and inoculating mesocosms with ze..., We conducted an outdoor mesocosm experiment with 15 tanks. 5 tanks received no microplastics, 5 tanks received 10 particles/L, and 5 tanks received 50 particles/L. We sampled zooplankton communities three times for 12 weeks. We measured total zooplankton, Shannon diversity, and Pielou's evenness., , # No effect of realistic concentrations of polyester microplastic fibers on freshwater zooplankton communities

The data are a CSV file of the zooplankton collected at each sampling period, in each of the 15 outdoor mesocosms.

## Description of the data and file structure

There are 12 columns of data and 451 rows.

Variable descriptions:

sample_idz: code assigned to the zooplankton sample
sample_date: year-month-day the sample was collected
Month: calendar month the sample was collected
Month.2: description of the sample month relative to when microplastics were added
Month.3: numerical categorization of the month where 0 is pre-microplastics addition, 1 = 1 month post microplastics addition, and 3 = 3 months post microplastics addition
Tank: arbitrary number assigned to each tank (15 tanks total)
zoop_group: taxonomic grouping
broad_group: zooplankton taxonomic groups more broadly defined
count.per.10L: the number of each type of zooplankton that was found in one 10L sample of...