SEACleaner project: citizen science and marine litter monitoring

Abstract

The marine litter (ML) problem has growing, in the last years, the interest of people towards micro and macro plastic pollution. The scientific community intensified the studies on it, describing abundances, typologies and distribution in several pelagic and coastal areas, even thanks to the Marine Strategy Framework Directive addresses (MSFD), that defines ML as one of the 11 principal descriptors. SEACleaner project [Merlino et al., 2015a], developed by CNR-ISMAR in collaboration with INGV and Ligurian Cluster of Marine Technology (DLTM), since 2013 is monitoring coastal regions inside 5 Italian Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) surrounding the Pelagos Sanctuary. It borne as citizen science and educational project, and involves non-governmental organizations (NGOs), volunteers and high school students in beach surveys (Fig. 1). The used protocol has been implemented following the MSFD recommendation (Merlino et al., 2015a), and enables students and volunteers to easily count and classify the beached macro ML, overcoming the lack of current data on beached ML and, at the same time, providing correct information and raising public awareness of this problem. An assessing study [Locritani et al., 2019] highlights in fact that citizen science approaches increase knowledge and sensitiveness on the ML problem in students that participated to SEACleaner project. The scientific monitoring results obtained [Giovacchini et al., 2018], in 11 beaches located in 5 MPAs, highlights differences in the abundances and typologies of ML, depending on the proximity to the rivers and on the kind of the beach: Urban (in residential and touristic areas, cleaned on regular basis), Urbanized (close to urban centers, low human presence but less regular cleaning), Natural (MPAs restricted areas, not cleaning). In detail, Natural sites, and particularly MPAs close to river mouths, show a major density of macro ML compared to other areas, probably due to the lack of frequently cleaning activities. The prevalent typology of ML found in each beach is related to its “Urbanization” class, with Natural beaches showing the major percentage of plastic and the minor percentage of litter categories related with touristic presence. SEACleaner now focus on micro-plastic surveys (Fig. 2) in the same Area of previous macro ML study, to verify if the accumulation of macro-plastic on the beaches favors fragmentation and so micro-plastic generation, making less accessible MPAs as possible source of micro-plastics.