Programme: Tender ESA
Project title: OSIP Remote Sensing for Marine Litter-Early Technology Development Scheme
Acronym: ESA-OSIP-RSML
Duration: 20/07/2020 – 19/07/2022
Total budget: € 175.000
ISMAR budget: € 30.000
Summary:
Monitoring areas closer to plastic marine litter sources such as rivers and estuarine systems has the potential to improve mitigation strategies. Upscaling in-situ point data of litter with earth observation (EO) and hydrodynamic models is our central concept. Sentinel-2 and 3, together with data from similar satellite missions, will be used to monitor discharging rivers and their estuaries based on river plume detection inferred from suspended particulate matter maps. Multi-type in-situ data will be collected at various points along the pollution pathway. Imagery taken from installed cameras on bridges or other infrastructure will be analyzed using deep-learning approaches in order to detect floating plastic in rivers (in-situ type 1). This will provide improved inputs to transport models. Water samples from estuaries and coastal areas using manta trawls (in-situ 2) are used to quantify plastic litter abundances. High-resolution monitoring via automated analysis of drone imagery along the shoreline (in-situ 3) will be established for accumulation analyses as well as collecting beach samples through field surveys (in-situ 4). Integration of in-situ data, multi-scale EO and hydrodynamic modelling serves as the development basis for a monitoring system of plastic debris in aquatic ecosystems, allowing for the first time an end-to-end depiction of real-world debris transport pathways.
Contact person in ISMAR: francesco.falcieri@ve.ismar.cnr.it
Partnership:
- Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH (Germany)
- Asociación Española de Basuras Marinas (Spain)
- Dr. Shungudzemwoyo P. Garaba, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Germany)
- CNR Istituto Scienze Marine (Italy)
- Universität Bayreuth, Animal Ecology I (Germany)
- Universidade de Coimbra (Portugal)
- HYDROMOD Service GmbH (Germany)