Spatial distribution of marine litter along italian coastal areas in the Pelagos sanctuary (Ligurian Sea - NW Mediterranean Sea): A focus on natural and urban beaches

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Debris Survey in Coastal Areas: Long-Term Monitoring Programme to Study Spatial and Temporal Accumulation of the Dynamics of Beached Marine Litter

“…Standard monitoring campaigns were carried out during our long-term monitoring program with the help of volunteers, citizens, researchers, and students, following the SeaCleaner protocol [52,53] (which meets the MFSD survey procedures [16] and the OSPAR guideline for size and type classification of BML [15]). To date, three beach cleaning operations have been carried out-at the beginning of the first period (12 April 2019), at the beginning of the second period (13 July 2019), and at the beginning of the third, for which data acquisition has not yet been completed (17 January 2020).…”

“…After the initial scan of the monitoring program (12 April 2019), the removal of anthropic material from the stretch of beach considered was carried out, excluding only objects with a linear dimension less than 2.5 cm (OSPAR protocol). The collected material was subsequently catalogued and counted according to a protocol previously adopted in this type of monitoring; this protocol integrated the Marine Strategy Framework Directives (MSFD) survey procedures [16], the OSPAR guideline [15] for size and type classification of BML and citizen science contribution, involving volunteers, researchers, and university students during beach cleaning operations, classification, and counting of objects (SeaCleaner protocol [52,53]). As a result, we could compare and match the ortho-photo data with those collected by standard manual surveys.…”

“…The comparison between the UAV and standard manual counting (made according to the SeaCleaner protocol [52,53], which met the MFSD survey procedures [16] and the OSPAR guideline for size and type classification of BML [15]) showed a good agreement for "medium" and "large" size objects (~67%-95%), while this was not the case for the "small" ones (~15%). The possible causes of this discrepancy are analysed in the Discussion section.…”

“…Small BMLs can be overestimated by manual counting. In fact, while for the protocol suggested by the OSPAR macro-waste guidelines (to which our specific SeaCleaner local monitoring protocol refers), objects smaller than 2.5 cm should not be considered [15,52,53,55], however, during manual counting such small objects were often counted equally, contrary to the recognition and counting by orthophotos.…”

Sources, spatial distribution and characteristics of marine litter along the west coast of Qatar

“…The density of ML on the west coast of Qatar (1.98 items/m 2 ) is higher than the global average of 1.0 items/m 2 (Galgani et al, 2015). Moreover, the average ML density is higher compared to that of other coastal regions (e.g., Red Sea (Martin et al, 2019), Italy (Giovacchini et al, 2018) and Slovenia (Laglbauer et al, 2014)), however, lesser than some other coastal regions (e.g., Iran (Sarafraz et al, 2016), Colombia (Rangel-Buitrago et al, 2017) and India (Jayasiri et al, 2013)). Overall, the quantity of stranded ML items along the coast shows the following order: low tide (296 items) < high tide (860 items) < berm line (1220 items).…”