New Report to Inform National Implementation of NOAA’s Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project
JULY 10, 2023 — The NOAA Marine Debris Program is developing a national shoreline marine debris monitoring plan in partnership with Western EcoSystems Technology Inc. Several national-international scale initiatives call for tools to document and report on the status and trends of marine debris. These include Regional Marine Debris Action Plans, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and momentum toward a global agreement on marine litter. Most recently, a report, requested by Congress through the U.S. Save our Seas Act 2.0 and published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), recommends that NOAA’s Marine Debris Program conduct a “scientifically designed national survey that is robust, hypothesis-driven, and conceptualized a priori to address critical knowledge gaps” (NASEM, 2021).
As a first step, the Marine Debris Program partnered with Western EcoSystems Technology, Inc., to develop the strategic nationwide sampling design. The project has three phases; 1) conduct a power analysis, 2) incorporate input from an external panel of experts, and 3) develop a sampling design that will prescribe the frequency, timing, and location of surveys.
The power analysis report can now be found on the Marine Debris Clearinghouse. The analysis utilized past Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project (MDMAP) data, from the Marine Debris Program, along with data from a historic monitoring effort known as the National Marine Debris Monitoring Program, to explore trade-offs between different design options and to determine the number of monitoring sites and surveys needed to answer specific questions. Investments in marine debris monitoring and detection will allow us to better understand the scope, scale, and distribution of marine debris in the environment and to address it in the future.