This visualization product displays the total abundance of marine litter per beach per year from research & cleaning operations. EMODnet Chemistry included the gathering of marine litter in its 3rd phase. Since the beginning of 2018, data of beach litter have been gathered and processed in the EMODnet Chemistry Marine Litter Database (MLDB). The harmonization of all the data has been the most challenging task considering the heterogeneity of the data sources, sampling protocols and reference lists used on a European scale. Preliminary processing were necessary to harmonize all the data : - Exclusion of OSPAR 1000 protocol, - Separation of monitoring surveys from research & cleaning operations - Exclusion of beaches with no coordinates - Normalization of survey lengths and survey numbers per year - Some categories & some litter types have been removed To calculate total abundances, formula below has been used : Total abundance=(Total number of items (normalized by 100 m))/(Number of surveys on the year) Percentiles 50, 75 & 95 have been calculated taking into account data from all years. More information is available in the document attached.
Beach Litter - Median total number of litter items per 100m & to 1 survey - Official monitoring