Development and testing of a prototype indicator-based tool for identification of potential problem areas for marine litter in Europe's seas

Date

2023-12-20

Author

Murray, Ciarán J.
van Bavel, Bert
Kıdeyş, Ahmet Erkan
Lusher, Amy L.
Reker, Johnny
Šubelj, Gašper
Andersen, Jesper H.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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We demonstrate a prototype multi-metric indicator-based assessment tool (i.e. Marine Litter Assessment Tool - MALT) for mapping and identification of ‘problem areas’ and ‘non-problem areas’ regarding the occurrence of marine litter in Europe's seas. The study is based on a European-wide data set consisting of three marine litter indicators: (1) litter at the seafloor, (2) beach litter and (3) floating micro-litter. This publicly available data allowed litter status to be determined in 1,957,081 km2 (19.1 %) of the total area of Europe's seas (10,243,474 km2). Of the area assessed, 25.8 % (505,030 km2) was found to be ‘non-problem areas’ whilst ‘problem areas’ accounted for 74.2 % (1,452,051 km2). This indicates that marine litter is a large-scale problem in Europe's seas.

Subject Keywords

Indicators, Integrated assessment, Marine litter, Microplastic, Problem areas

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85171432994&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/105741

Collections

Graduate School of Marine Sciences, Article