Despite growing evidence that biofilm formation on plastic debris in the marine environment may be essential for its biodegradation, the underlying processes have yet to be fully understood. Thus, far, bacterial biofilm formation had only been studied after short-term exposure or on floating plastic, yet a prominent share of plastic litter accumulates on the seafloor. In this study, we explored the taxonomic composition of bacterial and fungal communities on polyethylene plastic sheets and dolly ropes during long-term exposure on the seafloor, both at a harbor and an offshore location in the Belgian part of the North Sea. We reconstructed the sequence of events during biofilm formation on plastic in the harbor environment and identified a core bacteriome and subsets of bacterial indicator species for early, intermediate, and late stages of biofilm formation. Additionally, by implementing ITS2 metabarcoding on plastic debris, we identified and characterized for the first time fungal genera on plastic debris. Surprisingly, none of the plastics exposed to offshore conditions displayed the typical signature of a late stage biofilm, suggesting that biofilm formation is severely hampered in the natural environment where most plastic debris accumulates.

Agriculture is one of the economic sectors that affect climate change contributing to greenhouse gas emissions directly and indirectly. There is a trend of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions reduction, but any practice in this direction should not affect negatively farm productivity and economics because this would limit its implementation, due to the high global food and feed demand and the competitive environment in this sector. Precision agriculture practices using high-tech equipment has the ability to reduce agricultural inputs by site-specific applications, as it better target inputs to spatial and temporal needs of the fields, which can result in lower greenhouse gas emissions. Precision agriculture can also have a positive impact on farm productivity and economics, as it provides higher or equal yields with lower production cost than conventional practices. In this work, precision agriculture technologies that have the potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions are presented providing a short description of the technology and the impacts that have been reported in literature on greenhouse gases reduction and the associated impacts on farm productivity and economics. The technologies presented span all agricultural practices, including variable rate sowing/planting, fertilizing, spraying, weeding and irrigation.

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