Background The data set contains data on visual and chemical analysis of sediment and water samples taken at the confluence of the Elbe and the Mulde rivers in Germany. It was analysed in the paper by H. Laermanns, G. Reifferscheid, J. Kruse, C. Földi, G. Dierkes, D. Schaefer, C. Scherer, C. Bogner and F. Stock, 2021, “Microplastics in water and sediments at the confluence of the Elbe and Mulde rivers in Germany” (https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2021.794895) published in Frontiers in Environmental Science, Research Topic: “Plastics in Aquatic Systems: from Transport and Fate to Impacts and Management Perspectives”. Description of the dataset The data is available in the folder data_and_results.zip, and there in the folder data. The folder pyrolysis contains the file pyr-gc-ms_raw.csv. This is the pyrolysis analysis (see description in the paper for technical details). The calibration data are part of the supplemental material of the paper and can be downloaded there. The folder visual_analysis contains the files elbe_filter_photos_complete_v2.csv: IDs of samples, number of the photographs of filters, shapes of particles located on the filter elbe_samples_v2.csv: IDs of samples, medium (water or sediment sample), location and side (left or right riverside) of sampling, sampling tool, sampled volume and mesh size. The folder results contains the figures produced by the R code (see Description of the code). Description of the code The file MP_visual_and_chemical_analysis.Rmd is the R notebook we wrote for the analysis. For information on the software version, see Information on software version below. Disclaimer The data and code are provided as is without any warranty. Acknowledgements We thank the staff of the BfG laboratory for their support during the pyr-GC-MS analysis. Julia Horn helped with geochemical and sedimentological measurements in the laboratory of the Institute of Geography at the University of Cologne. Funding This study is embedded in the Project “Micro- and macroplastic in federal water ways of Germany” (Project 4.1.12, Project No. M39620304028) that intends to analyse the occurrence, transport mechanism, ecological risks and management options. This project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Project Number 391977956, SFB 1357. References Hannes Laermanns, Georg Reifferscheid, Jonas Kruse, Corinna Földi, Georg Dierkes, Dirk Schaefer, Christian Scherer, Christina Bogner and Friederike Stock, 2021, Microplastics in water and sediments at the confluence of Elbe and Mulde rivers in Germany, https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2021.794895 R Core Team, 2021, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, https://www.R-project.org/ Information on software version sessionInfo() R version 4.1.0 (2021-05-18) Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu (64-bit) Running under: Ubuntu 20.10 Matrix products: default BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/atlas/libblas.so.3.10.3 LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/atlas/liblapack.so.3.10.3 locale: [1] LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C [3] LC_TIME=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=de_DE.UTF-8 [5] LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=de_DE.UTF-8 [7] LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C attached base packages: [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets [6] methods base other attached packages: [1] lubridate_1.8.0 patchwork_1.1.1 ggforce_0.3.3 [4] gridExtra_2.3 RColorBrewer_1.1-2 forcats_0.5.1 [7] stringr_1.4.0 dplyr_1.0.7 purrr_0.3.4 [10] readr_2.0.2 tidyr_1.1.4 tibble_3.1.6 [13] ggplot2_3.3.5 tidyverse_1.3.1 loaded via a namespace (and not attached): [1] httr_1.4.2 sass_0.4.0 bit64_4.0.5 [4] vroom_1.5.5 jsonlite_1.7.2 modelr_0.1.8 [7] bslib_0.3.1 assertthat_0.2.1 highr_0.9 [10] cellranger_1.1.0 yaml_2.2.1 sessioninfo_1.1.1 [13] pillar_1.6.4 backports_1.2.1 glue_1.5.0 [16] digest_0.6.28 polyclip_1.10-0 rvest_1.0.0 [19] colorspace_2.0-2 htmltools_0.5.2 pkgconfig_2.0.3 [22] broom_0.7.6 haven_2.4.1 scales_1.1.1 [25] tweenr_1.0.2 tzdb_0.2.0 generics_0.1.1 [28] farver_2.1.0 ellipsis_0.3.2 withr_2.4.2 [31] cli_3.1.0 magrittr_2.0.1 crayon_1.4.2 [34] readxl_1.3.1 evaluate_0.14 fs_1.5.0 [37] fansi_0.5.0 MASS_7.3-54 xml2_1.3.2 [40] tools_4.1.0 hms_1.1.1 lifecycle_1.0.1 [43] munsell_0.5.0 reprex_2.0.0 compiler_4.1.0 [46] jquerylib_0.1.4 rlang_0.99.0.9000 grid_4.1.0 [49] rstudioapi_0.13 labeling_0.4.2 rmarkdown_2.11 [52] gtable_0.3.0 DBI_1.1.1 R6_2.5.1 [55] knitr_1.36 fastmap_1.1.0 bit_4.0.4 [58] utf8_1.2.2 rprojroot_2.0.2 desc_1.3.0 [61] stringi_1.7.5 parallel_4.1.0 Rcpp_1.0.7 [64] vctrs_0.3.8 dbplyr_2.1.1 tidyselect_1.1.1 [67] xfun_0.28