EMODnet Chemistry aims to provide access to marine chemistry data sets and derived data products concerning eutrophication, ocean acidification, contaminants and litter. The chosen parameters are relevant for the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD), in particular for descriptors 5, 8, 9 and 10. The dataset contains standardized, harmonized and validated data collections from beach litter (monitoring and other sources).
Datasets concerning beach and seafloor litter data are loaded in a central database after a semi-automated validation phase. Once loaded, a data assessment is performed in order to check data consistency and potential errors are corrected thanks to a feedback loop with data originators.
For beach litter, the harmonized datasets contain all unrestricted or SeaDataNet License EMODnet Chemistry data on beach litter data, including 12390 CDI records, in which 11152 refer to monitoring data, 1208 to data from cleaning surveys and 29 to data from research. A relevant part of the monitoring data has been considered for assessment purposes by the European institutions and therefore is tagged as MSFD_monitoring. The temporal range for monitoring data is from 2001-01-01 to 2020-08-26 and includes data from 582 beaches. For data from cleaning, the temporal range is from 2013-03-12 to 2020-04-22 and includes data from 831 beaches. For data from research, the temporal range is from 2014-04-07 to 2016-10-12 and includes data from 21 beaches. EMODnet beach litter data and databases are hosted and maintained by 'Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, Division of Oceanography (OGS/NODC)' from Italy.
Data are formatted following Guidelines and forms for gathering marine litter data, which can be found at: https://doi.org/10.6092/15c0d34c-a01a-4091-91ac-7c4f561ab508. The updated vocabularies of admitted values are available in https://nodc.ogs.it/marinelitter/vocab.
The harmonized datasets can be downloaded as EMODnet Beach litter data format Version 1.0, which is a spreadsheet file composed of 4 sheets: beach metadata, survey metadata, animals and litter.
The original datasets can be searched and downloaded from EMODnet Chemistry Chemistry CDI Data and Discovery Access Service: https://emodnet-chemistry.maris.nl/search