Data
Median of marine litter items by beach and marine region
GIS data
Median of marine litter items by beach and marine region
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Data
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INSPIRE compliant metadata
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Metadata
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Reporting obligations (ROD)
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- Not applicable
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Scale of the data set:
- 1:100000
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Rights:
- EEA standard re-use policy: unless otherwise indicated, re-use of content on the EEA website for commercial or non-commercial purposes is permitted free of charge, provided that the source is acknowledged (https://www.eea.europa.eu/legal/copyright). Copyright holder: European Environment Agency (EEA).
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Methodology:
A subset of the Marine Litter Watch (MLW) dataset was selected according to the following conditions:
- events that took place between 2013 and 2020;
- events at one of the four European seas;
- events at sea beaches (since the MLW dataset also covers some river and lake shores);
- beach sites between 90 and 850 meters in length;
- data records that pass the quality control criteria; e.g. checking for duplication, location, litter count (zero or blank excluded, as well as paraffin/wax), or other data inconsistencies.
Such selection criteria yielded data on > 800 beaches in 27 countries covering the four regional seas of Europe – with one-third of all sites being located in three countries: France, Italy, and Spain. From these beaches, 1440 events were recorded, with the majority in 2015–2019. The reference dataset analysed includes 1,178,143 litter items. The number of events varies between marine regions. To compare the beach litter abundance across the events, the counts of litter items are normalised to transects of 100 metres.
The EU Technical Group on Marine Litter (TGML), the main policy advising body on marine litter, agreed to use the median as the averaging method to mean beach litter data among surveys. The median is the middle value when a dataset is sorted from smallest to greatest. Unlike the mean, very high or very low values do not affect the median value in the dataset. Consequently, when some of the values are extreme, their effect on the median is smaller and hence better than mean values.-
Coordinate reference system:
- EPSG:3035
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Data sources
Information is available in ETC/ICM report 1/2021: Marine litter and European beaches: learning from citizen science (see https://www.eionet.europa.eu/etcs/etc-icm/products/etc-icm-reports/etc-icm-report-1-2021-marine-litter-and-european-beaches-learning-from-citizen-science).
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Owners:
- European Environment Agency (EEA)
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Processors:
- European Topic Centre on Inland, Coastal and Marine waters (ETC/ICM)
Additional information
Regional differences in the levels and share of different litter groups/items can be depicted through the four regional seas of Europe. For the combined clean-up and monitoring data having only 90–850 m of beach length, the Black Sea (median 423 items) and Mediterranean Sea (median 346 items) coasts appear more polluted when compared to the north Atlantic Ocean (median 122 items) and Baltic Sea (median 74 items), being the median values standardized per 100 m of beach.
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Geographic coverage
Temporal coverage
For references, please go to https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/median-of-marine-litter-items or scan the QR code.
PDF generated on 27 Jan 2023, 07:18 AM
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