Where does marine litter hide? The Providencia and Santa Catalina Island problem, SEAFLOWER Reserve (Colombia).

The SEAFLOWER Biosphere Reserve (SBR) is the largest Marine Protected Area in the Caribbean Sea and the second largest in Latin America. Marine protected areas are under pressure from various stressors, one of the most important issues being pollution by marine litter, especially plastic. In this study our aim is to establish the distribution pattern and potential sources of solid waste in the different marine/coastal ecosystems of the islands of Providencia and Santa Catalina (SBR), as well as assess any interconnections between these ecosystems.

Drones for litter mapping: An inter-operator concordance test in marking beached items on aerial images.

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS, aka drones) are being used to map macro-litter on the environment. Sixteen qualified researchers (operators), with different expertise and nationalities, were invited to identify, mark and categorize the litter items (manual image screening, MS) on three UAS images collected at two beaches. The coefficient of concordance (W) among operators varied between 0.

Beach-dune morphodynamics and marine macro-litter abundance: An integrated approach with Unmanned Aerial System.

This work shows an integrated approach for coastal environmental monitoring, which aimed to understand the relation between beach-dune morphodynamics, marine litter abundance and environmental forcing. Three unmanned aerial system (UAS) flights were deployed on a beach-dune system at the Atlantic Portuguese coast to assess two main goals: (i) quantifying the morphological changes that occurred among flights, with focus on dune erosion, and (ii) mapping the changes of marine macro-litter abundance on the shore. Two most vulnerable-to-erosion sectors of the beach were identified.