National Marine Debris Monitoring Program: citizen science observations from 1997–2007

We report counts of 31 marine debris indicator items selected by the National Marine Debris Monitoring Program (NMDMP) at sites around the United States and two U.S. territories (Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands). These data contain the complete quality checked set of debris data collected by the volunteers who worked on the National Marine Debris Monitoring Program, as well as the weather information provided by the volunteers for the time of the survey and the week preceding the survey. While the Program ran from 1997 through 2007, temporal coverage varies by coastal region because initiation of sampling was staggered across regions. The research articles that report on the results of the Program's data collection used a subset of these data, as not all sites had time series long enough to justify inclusion in the data analysis.
The National Marine Debris Monitoring Program was an early citizen science project designed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to quantitatively determine whether the amount of debris washing ashore on the U.S. coastline was changing over time. Ten regions were defined based on geography and relevant oceanic currents. The Program was designed to detect change in a region with power of 0.85 and Type I error rate (i.e., alpha) of 0.10.

The research articles based on these data extended the purpose to include assessing the utility of various physical drivers to explain variability in debris loads over time and space.