Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 564

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Microplastic pollution in St. Lawrence River sediments

Castañeda, Rowshyra A., Avlijas, Suncica, Simard, M. Anouk, Ricciardi, Anthony·2014·Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences

Abstract

Although widely detected in marine ecosystems, microplastic pollution has only recently been documented in freshwater environments, almost exclusively in surface waters. Here, we report microplastics (polyethylene microbeads, 0.40–2.16 mm diameter) in the sediments of the St. Lawrence River. We sampled 10 freshwater sites along a 320 km section from Lake St. Francis to Québec City by passing sediment collected from a benthic grab through a 500 μm sieve. Microbeads were discovered throughout this section, and their abundances varied by four orders of magnitude across sites. Median and mean (±1 SE) densities across sites were 52 microbeads·m−2 and 13 832 (±13 677) microbeads·m−2, respectively. The highest site density was 1.4 × 10 5 microbeads·m−2 (or 10 3 microbeads·L−1), which is similar in magnitude to microplastic concentrations found in the world’s most contaminated marine sediments. Mean diameter of microbeads was smaller at sites receiving municipal or industrial effluent (0.70 ± 0.01 mm) than at non-effluent sites (0.98 ± 0.01 mm), perhaps suggesting differential origins. Given the prevalence and locally high densities of microplastics in St. Lawrence River sediments, their ingestion by benthivorous fishes and macroinvertebrates warrants investigation.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1139/cjfas-2014-0281

Cites

10 of 10 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 10 references

Cited by

See all 564

Metadata

Authors
Castañeda, R. A., Avlijas, S., Simard, M. A., & Ricciardi, A.
Venue
Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences
Published
2014-12
Volume
71
Issue
12
Pages
1767-1771
ISSN
  • 0706-652X (ISSN-L)
  • 1205-7533
OpenAlex
W1949170326
Cited by
564
References
10
FWCI
16.23
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Microplastic pollution in St. Lawrence River sediments. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1139/cjfas-2014-0281
The paper
Castañeda, R. A., Avlijas, S., Simard, M. A., & Ricciardi, A. (2014). Microplastic pollution in St. Lawrence River sediments. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1139/cjfas-2014-0281

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.