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Are we even close? Five years marine litter ingestion monitoring in loggerhead turtles along Italian coast reveals how far we are from the Good Environmental Status
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This five-year monitoring study of marine litter ingestion in loggerhead sea turtles along Italian coasts found widespread plastic ingestion and evaluated five scenarios for defining Good Environmental Status (GES) thresholds under the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The study proposes a new threshold—less than 33% of turtles having more than 0.05 g of ingested plastic in the GI tract—as a practical benchmark for Mediterranean GES implementation.
The loggerhead sea turtle Caretta caretta has been chosen as bioindicator to monitor the amount of litter ingested by marine animals within the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Barcelona Regional Sea Convention. European Member States and Contracting Parties are committed to achieve the Good Environmental Status (GES), which is reached when the quantity of ingested litter does not adversely affect the health of the species concerned. Although the monitoring strategy has been outlined for more than a decade, to date no threshold values have been adopted to verify GES achievement. After five years of extensive monitoring along the Italian coasts, this study evaluates the suitability of five different GES scenarios and proposes a new threshold value (i.e., "there should be less than 33% of sea turtles having more than 0.05 g of ingested plastic in the GI") for its implementation in the European seas and the Mediterranean basin.
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