Objective
There is an urgent need to assess the levels of plastic pollution in the ocean, to allow for future monitoring and determine the efficacy of any remediation put into force. As a consequence, parallel to in situ observations, there is a growing interest in detecting marine debris using remote sensing satellite and UAV imagery. The Marine Remote Sensing Group (MRSG) at the University of the Aegean is one of the few groups worldwide with in-deep experience in developing artificial plastic debris target structures, in different configurations and polymer composition.There is an urgent need to assess the levels of plastic pollution in the ocean, to allow for future monitoring and determine the efficacy of any remediation put into force. As a consequence, parallel to in situ observations, there is a growing interest in detecting marine debris using remote sensing satellite and UAV imagery. The Marine Remote Sensing Group (MRSG) at the University of the Aegean is one of the few groups worldwide with in-deep experience in developing artificial plastic debris target structures, in different configurations and polymer composition.MRSG run for a second year the Plastic Litter Project (PLP), i.e. calibration/validation project for detecting artificial plastic targets on the sea surface using Sentinel satellite and UAV images (PLP2019) https://mrsg.aegean.gr/?content=&nav=65 and (PLP2018) https://mrsg.aegean.gr/?content=&nav=55 In PLP2018 (Topouzelis et al, 2019), we deployed 3 plastic 10x10m targets and analysed their presence in Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 imagery.in-deep experience in developing artificial plastic debris target structures, in different configurations and polymer composition. MRSG run for a second year the Plastic Litter Project (PLP), i.e. calibration/validation project for detecting artificial plastic targets on the sea surface using Sentinel satellite and UAV images (PLP2019) https://mrsg.aegean.gr/?content=&nav=65 and (PLP2018) https://mrsg.aegean.gr/?content=&nav=55 In PLP2018 (Topouzelis et al, 2019), we deployed 3 plastic 10x10m targets and analysed their presence in Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-1 imagery. Also, during PLP2019, partly funded by ESA project "EO tracking of marine debris in the Mediterranean Sea from public satellites", 6 new 5x5m targets were constructed, deployed and tested, and a database with more than 10 days of satellite captures with different targets of varying composition was produced. These encouraging results, together with other studies, indicate the possibility to remotely detect marine debris, although the technology and methodologies are still at a premature stage. This proposal is for designing and deploying permanent at-sea infrastructure and re-deployable target structures, with polymer composition representative of what is reported in the literature, for the calibration and validation of marine debris detection methodologies. Multi- and hyper-spectral imagery from UAV mounted cameras will form part of the datasets produced. All data will be stored on a database to be shared with the scientific community upon request.
Contract number
4000131040
Programme
OSIP Idea Id
I-2019-01094
Related OSIP Campaign
Marine Litter
Subcontractors
CONSIGLIO NAZIONALE DELLE RICERCHE - CNR A.S. PROTE MARITIME LTD
Main application area
NEW
Budget
175000€
