Publications

Plastic pollution is both a societal and environmental problem and citizen science has shown to be a useful tool to engage both the public and professionals in addressing it. However, knowledge on the educational and behavioral impacts of citizen science projects focusing on marine litter remains limited. Our preregistered study investigates the impact of the citizen science project Citizen Observation of Local Litter in coastal ECosysTems ...

The biofouling of submerged surfaces such as ship hulls is often prevented by using anti-fouling components in combination with booster biocides. These booster biocides enter the water column and may affect non-target organisms. Although different negative effects have been associated with the use of booster biocides, their effects on non-target organisms are often unknown. So far, the environmental risks for booster biocides have barely been ...

The global presence of plastic litter and its accumulation in the environment has become an issue of concern to the public and policymakers. This concern has triggered innovators in past decades to design and develop a multitude of remediation technologies to prevent plastic from entering the environment, or to clean up legacy litter. This study aims to (i) systematically review the current scientific literature on plastic remediation ...

Coastal environments effectively reduce perceived levels of stress. However, little is known about whether coastal environments influence physiological parameters of stress, whether these influences differ from those of urban and green environments, and whether these effects depend on the level of precedent stress. The current study exposed 164 participants (18-65y, 68% female) from the Flemish population to two 16-minute virtual reality ...

Current mitigation strategies to offset marine plastic pollution, a global concern, typically rely on preventing floating debris from reaching coastal ecosystems. Specifically, clean-up technologies are designed to collect plastics by removing debris from the aquatic environment such as rivers and estuaries. However, to date, there is little published data on their potential impact on riverine and estuarine organisms and ecosystems. Multiple ...

When applying the Ecosystem Services (ES) concept for the management of marine activities it is beneficial to involve stakeholders from the start and incorporate their knowledge in the decision-making process. Doing so can help to identify key ES, to prioritize the development of human activities that positively impact those ES, and to identify potential trade-offs and win-win scenarios between sectors. On the Belgian Continental Shelf (BCS), ...

Microplastic pollution is an issue of concern due to the accumulation rates in the marine environment combined with the limited knowledge about their abundance, distribution and associated environmental impacts. However, surveying and monitoring microplastics in the environment can be time consuming and costly. The development of cost- and time-effective methods is imperative to overcome some of the current critical bottlenecks in microplastic ...

Coastal environments are increasingly shown to have a positive effect on our health and well-being. Various mechanisms have been suggested to explain this effect. However, so far little focus has been devoted to emotions that might be relevant in this context, especially for people who are directly or indirectly exposed to the coast on a daily basis. Our preregistered qualitative study explored how coastal residents experience the emotions they ...

Worldwide river systems are under pressure from human development. River managers need to identify the most important stressors in a stream basin, to propose effective management interventions for river restoration. In the European Union, the Water Framework Directive proposes the ecological status as the management endpoint for these interventions. Many decision support tools exist that use predictive water quality models to evaluate different ...

Ecological risk assessment is commonly based on single-generation ecotoxicological tests that are usually performed at one standard temperature. We investigated the effects of nickel (Ni) on Daphnia magna reproduction at 15, 20, and 25 degrees C over 4 generations. Multigenerational Ni effects on D. magna reproduction depended on the magnitude of the effect in the first generation (F0) and showed very different patterns at different ...