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Beach litter - Median number of fishing & aquaculture related plastic items normalized per 100m & to 1 survey - Other sources 2001/2024 v2025

Marine debris

This visualization product displays the fishing & aquaculture related plastic items abundance of marine macro-litter (> 2.5cm) per beach per year from non-MSFD monitoring surveys, research & cleaning operations.

EMODnet Chemistry included the collection 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 processings were necessary to harmonize all the data:

  • Exclusion of OSPAR 1000 protocol: in order to follow the approach of OSPAR that it is not including these data anymore in the monitoring;

  • Selection of surveys from non-MSFD monitoring, cleaning and research operations;

  • Exclusion of beaches without coordinates;

  • Selection of fishing and aquaculture related plastic items only. The list of selected items is attached to this metadata. This list was created using EU Marine Beach Litter Baselines, the European Threshold Value for Macro Litter on Coastlines and the Joint list of litter categories for marine macro-litter monitoring from JRC (these three documents are attached to this metadata). The selection was adapted to the Joint list of litter categories fishing gears identification and therefore contains some differences with the selection made for previously published versions of this product;

  • Exclusion of surveys without associated length;

  • Normalization of survey lengths to 100m & 1 survey / year: in some case, the survey length was not 100m, so in order to be able to compare the abundance of litter from different beaches a normalization is applied using this formula:

Number of fishing & aquaculture related plastic items of the survey (normalized by 100 m) = Number of fishing & aquaculture related items of the survey x (100 / survey length)

Then, this normalized number of fishing & aquaculture related plastic items is summed to obtain the total normalized number of fishing & aquaculture related plastic items for each survey. Finally, the median abundance of fishing & aquaculture related plastic items for each beach and year is calculated from these normalized abundances of fishing & aquaculture related items per survey.

Percentiles 50, 75, 95 & 99 have been calculated taking into account fishing & aquaculture related plastic items from other sources data for all years.

More information is available in the attached documents.

Warning: the absence of data on the map does not necessarily mean that they do not exist, but that no information has been entered in the Marine Litter Database for this area.

Data and resources

Additional information

Temporal extent2001-01-01 – 2024-05-11
Date (creation)2025-02-21
StatusonGoing
Update frequencyasNeeded
Metadata languageen
LicenseCC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Source metadataISO 19115 XML
Last updated2026-11-04
Created2026-11-04
APIpackage_show