Marine Litter Watch is a European Environment Agency (EEA) initiative that aims to combat the plastic litter problem. It uses citizen science — scientific research conducted, at least partly, by members of the public — and mobile-phone technology to help individuals and communities come together to clean up Europe’s beaches. Volunteers use the Marine Litter Watch app to form communities that collect litter from beaches and send data on the items found to the EEA.

Collection period: 2013 - 2022

Zone: Europe

Raw data unit is collection event (monitoring, clean up, etc.). Information is available on location (country, beach name, beach sea, spatial coordinates, etc.), time, amount and type of object(s) collected.

Objects are coded. Classification is reported in a separate meta data file.

OpenLitterMap is a citizen science litter-mapping game that empowers anyone to map and share geographic data on litter, brands, and plastic pollution. Data collected are open and downloadable for free and usable for any purpose. OpenLitterMap rewards users with cryptocurrency tokens Littercoin for doing the work of mapping and producing open data.

Data are constantly updated and can be downloaded choosing a country of interest.

Collection period: 2017 - present

Zone: Italy (available: any country)

Raw data unit is collection event (individual record in mobile app). Information is available on location (address, spatial coordinates), time, amount and type of object(s) collected.

All R packages in this project are versioned with renv.