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Development and testing of a prototype indicator-based tool for identification of potential problem areas for marine litter in Europe's seas
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Researchers developed and tested a multi-metric Marine Litter Assessment Tool for mapping problem areas in European seas using data on seafloor litter, beach litter, and floating micro-litter. Of the 19% of European sea area with sufficient data, 74% was classified as a problem area, confirming marine litter as a widespread regional crisis.
We demonstrate a prototype multi-metric indicator-based assessment tool (i.e. Marine Litter Assessment Tool - MALT) for mapping and identification of 'problem areas' and 'non-problem areas' regarding the occurrence of marine litter in Europe's seas. The study is based on a European-wide data set consisting of three marine litter indicators: (1) litter at the seafloor, (2) beach litter and (3) floating micro-litter. This publicly available data allowed litter status to be determined in 1,957,081 km2 (19.1 %) of the total area of Europe's seas (10,243,474 km2). Of the area assessed, 25.8 % (505,030 km2) was found to be 'non-problem areas' whilst 'problem areas' accounted for 74.2 % (1,452,051 km2). This indicates that marine litter is a large-scale problem in Europe's seas.
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