Web-based Citizen Involvement in Research into Pathways and Hotspots of Marine Litter in the Southern North Sea

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a way in which citizens can be effectively involved in data collection to generate new knowledge about pathways and hotspots of marine litter abundance in the North Sea region of Germany. This should help to tackle the problem within an interdisciplinary research approach. We use a combination of in-situ experiments involving the release of degradable wooden drifters into the North Sea and a web-based survey provided by the Geospatial Content Management System (GeoCMS) 'HotSpot' to report drifter sightings. The focus lies on the techniques used to provide the web-based report tool as well as on the methods used to ensure data quality and inform participants via web mapping tools. We present an overview of the first results, which are also available in the project's web portal, to increase public awareness of the global litter problem, in particular macroplastics in the oceans and along the North Sea coast.

Sources, pathways, and abatement strategies of macroplastic pollution: an interdisciplinary approach for the southern North Sea

“…In addition to fifteen land-based locations, several offshore release sites were selected by the physical oceanographers based on regional hydrodynamic conditions. To collect data of wooden drifter reports, an online portal was created, allowing the public to register their findings which were subsequently displayed in an interactive map together with some basic statistics (see Aden, 2019 andAden andStephan, 2017 for technical details). The report rate of ~43% (~27,000 validated wooden drifter reports until July 2019) emphasises the significant role that citizen scientists can play in the generation of large data sets (Carcia-Soto and van der Meeren, 2017).…”

Explicit incentives increase citizen science recordings

“…Citizens play an increasingly important role in the production of scientific data for conservation (Bonney et al., 2014; Crain et al., 2014; Parrish et al., 2019; Vohland et al., 2021). The data generated by citizen science projects range from opportunistic recordings that complement professional datasets (Soroye et al., 2018) to targeted interventions that rely exclusively on volunteer recordings (Aden & Stephan, 2017). Citizen science data have been used to document global processes such as biodiversity loss (Eichenberg et al., 2021), land‐use change (Liu et al., 2022), invasive species (Negrete et al., 2020), and distribution shifts due to climate change (Champion et al., 2018; Masto et al., 2022).…”