Participatory Sensing Marine Debris: Current Trends and Future Opportunities

The monitoring of litter and debris is challenging at the global scale because of spatial and temporal variability, disconnected local organizations and the use of paper and pen for documentation. The Marine Debris Tracker mobile app and citizen science program allows for the collection of global standardized data at a scale, speed and efficiency that was not previously possible. The app itself also serves as an outreach and education tool, creating an engaged participatory sensing instrument. This instrument is characterized by several aspects including range and frequency, accuracy and precision, accessibility, measurement dimensions, participant performance, and statistical analysis. Also, important to Marine Debris Tracker is open data and transparency. A web portal provides data that users have logged allowing immediate feedback to users and additional education opportunities. The engagement of users through a top tracker competition and social media keeps participants interested in the Marine Debris Tracker community. Over half a million items have been tracked globally, and maps provide both global and local distribution of data. The Marine Debris Tracker community and dataset continues to grow daily. We will present current usage and engagement, participatory sensing data distributions, choropleth maps of areas of active tracking, and discuss future technologies and platforms to expand data collection and conduct statistical analysis.