Plastic pollution poses a significant and persistent threat to the health and functioning of aquatic ecosystems worldwide. Microbial communities living on plastic have garnered attention for their ability to influence plastic's life history and serve as carriers of novel biological threats, including pathogens and invasive species. This work, however, has largely been done in marine systems. To properly mitigate the impacts of plastic pollution, it is crucial to better understand the way in which microbial communities develop on freshwater and estuarine plastics. Here, we show how time, site, and hydrological conditions impact microbial development and composition on aquatic plastics incubated along a salinity gradient in the River Great Ouse, UK. We aimed to model plastic biofilm formation to inform the duration of plastic immersion in an aquatic environment. Inconsistent with marine biofilm models, we found that the dynamic and variable nature of rivers and estuaries can lead to complex patterns in biofilm development, making temporal models of aquatic biofilm development harder to predict. This study highlights the stochastic nature of plastic biofilm development in aquatic systems, emphasizing the need for further research to incorporate these stochastic processes into effective predictive tools that can estimate the duration of plastic immersion.
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