Line of action:

Status:

Execution date:

General:

Provide teams and authorities with more information on waste history to obtain evidence of potential pollutants, design more efficient countermeasures (e.g. blocking pollution from reaching areas of interest) and devise more efficient clean-up strategies by integrating relevant information on sea dynamics into the analysis. In relation to solid elements, such as plastics, almost nothing is known about the journey they follow from origin to destination, since in most cases the journey takes between days, weeks or even months, and involves complex marine dynamics.

Specific:

1. Identification of litter on beaches.

2. Upgrade litterdrone.

3. Analysis of garbage data in different campaigns and observations and their relationship with marine currents.

4. Analysis of remote sensing images taken by satellite.

5. Dissemination actions.

6. Marketing study.

This new project aims to go a step further, studying the origin/destination of waste when it is brought/carried by sea. To this end, the following activities are proposed:

• Collection of beach waste data (UVIGO manager): official data from the Spanish monitoring programme (public), data obtained during the Litterdrone project using the tools developed (more detailed data) and new data obtained with Litterdrone carrying out new flights.
• Modelling of marine currents to and from the areas of interest (CSIC responsible), a model will be created that will make a prediction about the possible journey of this waste when it comes from the sea or is incorporated into it.
• Search for waste through satellite images (UVIGO manager): based on the predictions of the models, a semi-automatic treatment of satellite images of the possible areas of origin/destination will be carried out. In addition, for the areas of origin, the existence of structures of human origin will be studied: coastal constructions, boats. For this part, it is planned to subcontract (at least partially) to the company GMV, experts in satellite remote sensing. Here they will use automatic processing systems such as SIMONS.
• Improvements to Litterdrone (UVIGO manager): taking advantage of the new flights (and new data) it is intended to improve some of the processes of the current software.
• Commercial applicability study (UVIGO manager): three professors from the Faculty of Business, experts in marketing, are incorporated into the project. Their task will be to develop a study on the commercial potential of the technology developed in the rest of the project.

With the development of this project, through the analysis of satellite images and the study of sea currents, it has been possible to obtain information on the traceability of waste, linking the destination with the origin of the pollution and detecting potentially polluting points. The project allows us to conclude that through drone flight, it is possible to georeference and characterize garbage found in places of difficult access, through an efficient system with high reliability.

To this end, eight campaigns have been carried out, four of them have been flight campaigns with drones to obtain images and their subsequent processing with the specialized software Litterdrone. Improvements have been made to this software, moving to version 4.1. and prototypes of specialized cameras have been developed with new experiments to detect floating plastic from the drone. The remaining four campaigns consisted of the placement of plastic targets on the coastline and floating targets for the validation of the methods.

The images and data obtained have been analysed, observing the relationship with marine currents, including the calculation of flows in the area of the Rías Baixas and the north of Portugal and the detection of flow between the Miño estuary and the Rías Baixas.

Based on data on litter on beaches (the official data of the monitoring programme of 2017, 2018 and 2019 and those obtained with Litterdrone), data on currents and tides have been used to try to identify the different flows at sea and places of origin and destination of the waste. The data on beach litter were provided to the CSIC-ICMAT to apply its models based on ocean observation services (IBI). Finally, several videos were obtained that model the flows in the sea.

In relation to the analysis of remote sensing images taken by satellite, an algorithm for the detection of floating plastics was developed and the feasibility of using artificial neural networks for the detection of plastics was tested. This new method was shown to be valid for large accumulations, where the use of neural networks over all frequency bands is the solution that provides the best result.

Likewise, in addition to several actions for the dissemination of the project, two written reports have been prepared on the possible commercialization of the technologies developed.