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Project MARLESS was presented at 9 th International Symposium Monitoring of Mediterranean Coastal Areas: problems and measurement techniques

Published on 24/06/2022 (last modified 24/06/2022)

The Symposium, organized every two years, is aimed at Mediterranean researchers and addresses issues related to Mediterranean coastal areas and investigations in technical and instrumental solutions to face problems related to: energy production in the coastal area, morphology and evolution of coastlines, flora and fauna of the littoral system, management and integrated coastal protection, coastline geography, human influence on coastal landscape.

14-15-16 June 2022

Representatives of Autonomous Region Friuli Venezia Giulia presented An integrated approach for marine litter hot spots identification. In this work, it was presented an integrated approach to the marine litter hot spots identification. The results came from a coordinate activity of field campaigns, satellite monitoring and numerical model simulations carried on as part of the MARLESS INTERREG IT-HR project. This method has been applied on the Adriatic basin and it is focused on the coastal areas. This method integrates the application of a numerical dispersion model, the NOAA PyGnome model, and the systematic analyses of satellite images collected by ESA Sentinel missions. The dispersion model runs simulate the litter transport, after the release from known sources of pollutants. We have shown that it is important to include the litter beaching and refloating action to achieve a realistic description of the accumulations areas. The likelihood of those areas is increased using the analysis of the backward trajectory distribution across the studied basin and assuming the main pollutants sources known with high probability, like river mouths, coastal points with high anthropic density and harbours. The simulated hot spots have also been monitored systematically using the Sentinel 2 spectral imagery. We have described the process to produce the spectral fingerprint for specific materials (like wood, rocks, sand) and the need of neural networks in order to find the specific spectral signature of plastic litter. Finally, the application of data, which have been collected thanks to in situ monitoring activities, are going to be used to validate the remote sensing and the modeling results. Some examples of this integrated approach have been presented for the northern Adriatic basin considering the 4 greatest accumulation points found from the simulations of 3 types of litters released from 16 different sources. In those points the spectral analysis has been conducted in order to find different spectra from the known ones (i.e., water, sand) that can be possibly related with plasticmarine litter. Conclusions: The future improvement of this combined analysis approach has been presented. The next steps will regard the development of a neural network algorithm,the use of a new model to improve the simulations outputs (PARCELS), the better understanding of the refloating time of different marine litter.

At the symposium were preserent international and national experts on environmental matters.