Beach litter - Median of total abundance items normalized per 100m & to 1 survey - EU-MSFD monitoring 2001/2023 v2025

This visualization product displays the total abundance of marine macro-litter (> 2.5cm) per beach per year from Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) monitoring surveys.

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 MSFD surveys only (exclusion of other monitoring, cleaning and research operations);
- Exclusion of beaches without coordinates;
- Some categories & some litter types like organic litter, small fragments (paraffin and wax; items > 2.5cm) and pollutants have been removed. 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);
- Normalization of survey lengths to 100m & 1 survey / year: in some cases, the survey length was not exactly 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 items (normalized by 100 m) = Number of litter per items x (100 / survey length)
Then, this normalized number of items is summed to obtain the total normalized number of litter for each survey. Finally, the median abundance for each beach and year is calculated from these normalized abundances per survey.
Sometimes the survey length was null or equal to 0. Assuming that the MSFD protocol has been applied, the length has been set at 100m in these cases.

Percentiles 50, 75, 95 & 99 have been calculated taking into account MSFD 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 it does not exist, but that no information has been entered in the Marine Litter Database for this area.