Microplastic pollution has risen to such a level that concerns are being raised regarding its consequences on the environment, especially the marine environment. Understanding microplastic pollution temporal dynamics is critical but requires time-series. However, concerns about microplastic pollution being recent, long term monitoring programs have only started very recently and remain scarce. Natural History Collections that represent archives from the past can constitute time-series. Although underused, they have evinced their success to study various stressors including pollutants, in particular when using bioindicators. Bioindicator species should be defined with regards to the studied environmental disturbance according to established criteria. Those criteria include occurring frequently, being sensitive to the pollutant, and allowing, via their monitoring, a summary of the pollutant’s impacts at molecular, organismal or population levels. However, to analyse bioindicator species in Natural History Collection time-series, several specificities need to be considered. Starting from a review of articles that utilised such collections to study microplastic evolution in a given ecosystem, and focusing on their methodologies, we emphasise Natural History Collection features that need to be taken into account when choosing the most adequate taxon and extraction techniques. In particular we discuss four collection features: sampling heterogeneity, taxonomic misidentification, past environmental contamination and specimen destruction and provide leads to address these issues. We believe that combining the concept of bioindicator with valuable samples from Natural History Collections is of particular interest to monitor past microplastic pollution and better predict future trends. This constitutes a necessary step in assessing the basal level and the continuing evolution of this ever-increasing pollution.

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自然历史采集标本能否作为水生微塑料污染生物指示剂？

微塑料污染已达到如此严重的程度，人们对其对环境，特别是海洋环境造成的后果表示担忧。了解微塑料污染的时间动态至关重要，但需要时间序列。然而，人们对微塑料污染的担忧最近才出现，长期监测计划最近才开始，而且仍然很少。代表过去档案的自然历史收藏可以构成时间序列。尽管未得到充分利用，但他们已经成功地研究了包括污染物在内的各种压力源，特别是在使用生物指示剂时。应根据既定标准根据所研究的环境干扰来定义生物指示剂物种。这些标准包括频繁发生、对污染物敏感，并允许通过监测总结污染物在分子、有机体或群体水平上的影响。然而，为了分析自然历史收集时间序列中的生物指示剂物种，需要考虑几个特殊性。从对利用此类集合来研究给定生态系统中微塑料进化的文章的回顾开始，并重点关注其方法，我们强调在选择最合适的分类单元和提取技术时需要考虑的自然历史集合特征。我们特别讨论了四个收集特征：采样异质性、分类错误识别、过去的环境污染和标本破坏，并提供解决这些问题的线索。我们相信，将生物指示剂的概念与自然历史收藏中的有价值样本相结合，对于监测过去的微塑料污染并更好地预测未来趋势特别有意义。这是评估这种不断增加的污染的基础水平和持续演变的必要步骤。