With a total of 35 open access peer-reviewed articles, TOPIOS has made deep and fundamental advances into the community’s understanding of how ocean currents transport plastic. We have shown how most plastic that enters the ocean from land, remains within the coastal zone for very long times (Onink et al 2021, Van der Mheen et al 2020, Morales-Caselles et al 2021, Kaandorp et al 2020, Van Duinen et al 2022). We have also shown how biofouling by marine algae affects the buoyancy of floating microplastics and can thus make them sink (Lobelle et al 2021, Fischer et al 2022, De la Fuente et al 2021).
Furthermore, TOPIOS has supported large review articles on The Physical Oceanography of the Transport of Floating Marine Debris (Van Sebille et al 2020), on Lagrangian Ocean Analysis (Van Sebille et al 2018), on satellite remote sensing of plastics (Martinez-Vicente et al 2019), and on a concept for an Integrated Ocean Observing System (Maximenko et al 2019). Finally, TOPIOS has developed the open-source OceanParcels.org framework (Lange and Van Sebille 2017; Delandmeter and Van Sebille 2019), which is now the backbone tool for both the TOPIOS project itself as well as dozens of international groups who simulate plastics and other material through the ocean.
Finally, TOPIOS results and staff have informed policy-making at national and European levels, has been featured in more than 40 international media, and has been at the foundation of the SeaClearly Team that won the 2022 BlueCloud hackathon for their idea to use TOPIOS technology to support Environmental Impact Assessments for aquaculture farming.
