Abstract

Mapping Marine Plastic Pollution across Boundaries
Track: Ocean, Coastal, and Marine Resources
Authors: Ann Zellers

Contamination of the world's oceans by plastic pollution has been a growing concern since the late 1990's. Algalita Marine Research Institute is a nonprofit with a research objective of understanding the scope and impact of plastic pollution in the global marine ecosystem. Since 1997 Algalita has been documenting the concentration and distribution of plastic marine debris in the North Pacific Gyre. Recently Algalita collaborated with other nonprofit foundations, university researchers and citizen scientists, expanding the project to all the world's oceans. With the help of ESRI, Algalita is developing interactive maps to share the resulting data and to protect the marine environment through education. This work is complicated by the task of making highly variable ocean data, collected by diverse participants, accessible to other researchers and projects. GIS provides a means to visually simplify the presentation of variable ocean research data, and to control for the input from many authors.