Development and testing of a prototype indicator-based tool for identification of potential problem areas for marine litter in Europe's seas
- Year of publication
- 2023
- Journal
- Science of the Total Environment
- Contributors
- Ciaran Joseph Murray, Bert van Bavel, Ahmet E. Kideyş, Amy Lorraine Lusher, Johnny Reker, Gašper Šubelj, Jesper Harbo Andersen
Amy Lusher
Ciaran Joseph Murray
Jesper Andersen
Bert van Bavel
Summary
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.