“…Spatial and temporal trends are an important aspect of ecological research, including quantifying and predicting plastic accumulation patterns over time. However, gathering the necessary, robust datasets can be extremely challenging due to the variability in sampling and reporting methods, difficulty associated with working in remote areas (i.e., dangerous weather conditions; Browne et al, 2015), and seasonality in debris accumulation (Maharani et al, 2020;Ríos et al, 2018). For example, seasonal variability was identified in the remote island beaches of the Azores archipelago, likely a result of temporal wind exposure, and human influences (i.e., tourists more prevalent in summer leading to more beach clean-ups in this season) (Ríos et al, 2018).…”