SAF03 - Automated mapping of beach cleanup efforts

Batavierenstraat 15 3014 JH Rotterdam The Netherlands

Problem: Understanding ocean plastic pollution is a difficult task for numerous reasons: its global coverage, the scarcity of data on plastics, the scarcity of measurements on oceanic and atmospheric transport. A systematic measurement effort can become very challenging given the number of beaches, their access and the material which they are composed of. Situation & idea: One of the main mechanisms that indefinitely or temporarily removes the plastics from oceanic systems is the beaching phenomenon. Thanks to this phenomenon some beaches are clean but others collect a big amount of plastic pollution. Some of these beaches are subject to regular beach cleanup activities which can provide a wealth of data when it comes to understanding the mass of plastics being stranded on them. Yet, a lot of cleanup efforts are poorly documented and quantifying the contribution of beaches as plastic sinks, as opposed to e. g. river mouths as plastic sources, is a very challenging task.

The challenge is to map out in time and space beach cleanup efforts and to find correlations between the beach properties, the oceanic and atmospheric conditions so that we can assess the beaching likelihood and optimize beach cleanup efforts.

Natural language processing expert
Web scrapping
Marine science (plastic pollution)