7th International Conference on Marine Debris: citizens, let’s do science!

The SeaCleaners’ Scientific Hub is currently researching, in partnership with other NGOs, how citizen science programs can be developed to provide answers at the local level, inform policy locally and regionally while contributing to the global knowledge on plastic waste. 

Citizen sciences provide valuable data to the scientific community to understand trends, flows, drifts, identify where plastic waste is washed up and concentrated, and even help solve the mystery of “missing plastics” (to understand everything about this subject, we invite you to discover the work of Denise Hardesty, member of the International Scientific Advisory Board of The SeaCleaners). But are there best practices to encourage citizens to contribute to this research? What are the opportunities and challenges for the communities involved? How can the data collected be harmonized on a global scale so that it can be compared and provide actionable information that will lead to concrete improvements in the fight against marine plastic pollution? These are the questions that the Scientific Hub is trying to answer in order to set up The SeaCleaners citizen science program. 

This work was presented by Gwenaële Coat, on behalf of Mathilde Fradin intern from AgroParisTech who worked on the issue from March to the end of September this year, at the 7th International Marine Debris Conference on Wednesday Sept 28 in Busan South Korea in a technical session titled “Citizen science for combatting marine litter: challenges and possibilities”. 

This session, co-chaired by Prof. Alexander Turra (Oceanographic Institute of the University of São Paulo) and Dr. Kayleigh Wyles (University of Plymouth), discussed possible gaps in the goals and expectations of the citizen scientists and scientists in tackling marine litter.  

The scientific hub focused its investigation on three main aspects to comprehend citizen science and if and how The SeaCleaners could use it: 

• A literature review that spanned several years and programs geographically to better comprehend where and how citizen science was used 
• Several meetings with actors of the field mainly in France and across the globe, including a -survey with 50 of its most active volunteers 
• And of course, protocol reviews to decide how TSC may work with its volunteers and design its own program. 

From a scientific and pedagogical point of view, establishing a strict protocol for the citizen science program is imperative, in order to guarantee confidence in the data collected by the NGO volunteers. The latter receive specific training to ensure that the clean ups respect an imposed methodology. It is the scrupulous respect of this protocol that allows the whole program to be recognized and integrated into existing national or international studies. For the contributors, knowing that their efforts and the data recorded are contributing to something greater than a local cleanup is especially gratifying.  

This dimension is far from negligible. It is even what gives real added value to the citizen science programs from NGOs like The SeaCleaners, mobilizing participants who are, by definition, volunteers and highly motivated. A qualitative survey of 50 volunteers from The SeaCleaners showed that 65% of them were ready to commit to a participatory science program. Their main motivations? To contribute to the production of useful knowledge and to serve their ecological beliefs. The conviction that the means of fighting on the ground must be based on solid, supported and validated scientific knowledge is a powerful driving force for commitment. 

 For The SeaCleaners, the fact that our volunteers are ready to jump on the citizen science bandwagon opens up exciting prospects for collaboration: we are already working on integrating these data into existing scientific platforms, using harmonized protocols, with the aim of ensuring that the data collected can usefully inform local, national or international public policies, and ultimately improve the means of action implemented by civil society actors.