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Tier 2
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Original research — experimental, observational, or case-control study. Direct primary evidence.
Marine & Wildlife
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Assessment of marine litter through remote sensing: recent approaches and future goals
Marine Pollution Bulletin2021
112 citations
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Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count.
Score: 50
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0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
This review classified remote sensing approaches for detecting marine litter — including satellite, aircraft, and drone platforms with optical, infrared, and radar sensors — finding that few studies had reached operational status and that detecting small or submerged litter remains a major technical challenge.
This bibliographic review provides an overview of techniques used to detect marine litter using remote sensing. The review classified studies in terms of platform (satellite, aircrafts, drones), sensors (passive or active), spectral (visible, infrared, microwaves), spatial resolution (<1 to >30 m), type and size (macroplastics, microplastics), or classification methodology (sighting, photointerpretation, supervised). Most studies applied satellite information to address marine litter using multi- and hyper- spectral optical sensors. The correspondence analysis on analyzed variables exhibited that aircrafts with high spatial resolution (<3 m) with optical sensors (λ = 400 to 2500 nm) seem to be the most optimum combination to target marine litter, while satellites carrying Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors (λ = 3.1 to 5.6 cm) may detect sea-slicks associated to surfactants that might contain high concentration of microplastics. Gaps indicate that future goals in marine litter detection should be addressed with platforms including optical and SAR sensors.