The LOCATE project focued on the development of a predictive and monitoring tool to improve the regional management of floating litter in coastal areas. The tool has been built developing a marine litter dispersion numerical model coupled to hydrodynamic information, plastic data and evaluated with satellite derived information. The coupled model is envisaged to work in coastal regions and applied to the littoral region of the Barcelona city as a proof of concept with the aim to extend the concept to other regions.

Marine litter is a global issue; rubbish can be found in all the seas from the equator to the poles, as well as in freshwater systems, such as rivers and lakes. Most marine litter is plastic and, as plastic production continues to increase, greater impacts are expected. Plastic marine litter dramatically affects marine ecosystems and has a huge economic impact.

Successfully mitigating the damage caused by marine litter requires large-scale, accurate mapping of oceanborne plastics across the globe. Quantifying where and how much plastic debris enters the marine environment in a global spatio-temporal sense is critical in formulating solutions to the plastic pollution problem. Satellite-based measurements can help to survey remote, isolated locations in which direct observations are sparse, costly, and difficult.

The main objectives of the REACT project were to:
▪ Assess how plastic litter can be detected and quantified with current and future remote sensing tools;
▪ Develop adaptive indices insensible to biases induced by sunglint on satellite radiometric products and indicate the constraints of current satellite missions under various atmospheric and illumination conditions;

The goal of the project was to generate synthetic data sets of marine debris accumulations and to train on them AI models in view to automatically detect plastic litter accumulations in real EO images.

In order to achieve this goal, the project aimed at the following objectives:

The Project 'Plastic waste and the Black Sea, monitoring litter at sea and on the land from Sentinel-2 data' was funded by the Discovery element of ESA's Basic Activities, and it had the following objectives:

• To facilitate systematic marine debris detection by Earth observation for tracking them before they beach, if ever, by improving a detection algorithm already sketched and tested, and develop a true detector from it
• To test various methodologies for the detection and identification of terrestrial illegal dumping sites