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Abstract

The Cilician Basin located in the Northeastern Mediterranean is a region that is affected by a diversity of anthropogenic pressures and is further expected to suffer from negative economic, environmental and social impacts of coastal litter. To provide a baseline for litter management plans, the standing crop of coastal macro-litter was sampled on 13 beaches following MSFD guidelines. Environmental predictors characterizing beach use and potential land based litter point sources in the vicinity of the beaches were related to litter densities to identify litter sources. The average litter density was 0.92 ± 0.36 items/m 2 . Litter items resulting from convenience food consumption and smoking made up more than half of the total litter collected, while agricultural, industrial, fishing activities together contributed only 6% of the total number of items. Plastic items on average constituted more than 80% of the dominant material type. Percentages of the litter transported with currents from neighbouring countries (transboundary litter) varied from 0 -4.23% between beaches. Direct deposition on the beaches was identified as the main method for transport of items to the coastal environment. Our results show poor local awareness and underline the need for educational programs that can help reduce coastal litter.

The Way of Macroplastic through the Environment

“…Concentrations of MaP on shorelines differentiates between the northern and southern hemisphere (data based on[115,122,144,149,[151][152][153][154][155][156][157][158][159][160][161][162][163]). …”

Marine Debris on New Zealand Beaches - Baseline Data to Evaluate Regional Variances

“…Although these studies did report results in an equivalent format (items m -2 ), not all studies measured the same part of the beach, thus making results incomparable. Specifically, the studies in Australia, Turkey, and the Azores, measured from the waterline into the backshore, whereas in Sri Lanka, quadrats were used with an unknown location on the beach (Aydin et al, 2016;Hardesty et al, 2017;Jang et al, 2018;Ríos et al, 2018). To address this universal challenge of incomparable results of beach surveys, international recommendations to harmonize beach study methods have been made (GESAMP, 2019).…”

Benthic marine litter in the Marmara Sea, Turkey

“…Previous research on marine litter has been mostly conducted in the Northeast Levantine Coasts of Turkey (Güven et al, 2013;Eryaşar et al, 2014;Aydın et al, 2016;Gündoğdu et al, 2017;Olguner et al, 2018, Gündoğdu andÇevik, 2019;Mutlu et al, 2020;. Some published data are also available about the neighboring seas.…”

“…In most of these studies, benthic marine litter abundance is determined with a swept area of bottom trawl sampling. Aydın et al (2016) and Artüz et al (2021) focus on coastal macrolitter around beaches. All in all, no previous studies were found to have researched benthic marine litter abundance in the Marmara Sea.…”