Utilizing data from the San Diego area, ArcGIS Online, and the Living Atlas, OpenOceans has completed a dashboard, toolkit, and predictive model that defines and maps each beach and shoreline within a region and creates a visual understanding of how plastic might travel to that shoreline.

Called the Pathways of Ocean Plastic Pollution (POPP), the Esri Geographic Information System (GIS) dashboard includes geospatial methods to plot individual beaches while highlighting rivers, storm drain outlets, watershed regions that drain to beaches, illegal trash dumps, etc. The dashboard also includes access to ocean current observations that indicate how plastic might have migrated from other areas.

Because 75 percent of ocean plastic is located on a beach or another shoreline, those coastal areas are an appropriate proxy for ocean plastic pollution.

OpenOceans has assembled the following elements to identify these pathways and to help local and regional stakeholders using the dashboard to find and stop the leaks of plastic into the environment before it reaches the ocean:

• Watershed data enable dashboard users to click on the name of a beach and see what watershed affects that beach, including, where available, storm drains, flow lines (intermittent streams), and rivers.

• The Trace Downstream tool enables users to follow the source of a contaminant downstream. Visualizations of ocean currents are also available to help identify which river(s) might have contributed plastic to a shoreline.

• A Plastic tracing tool (PTT) determines how ocean plastic might have reached a given shoreline from an offshore source, including from fishing operations.

• A digital library of solutions to help users of the POPP toolkit find solutions that have been implemented in other parts of the world.

• Stakeholders: organizations that own, maintain or clean up the beach are listed by beach.

OpenOceans is implementing a POPP technology pilot in Ecuador.

Learn more here.

Read OpenOceans’ article in Sea Technology‘s January 2025 issue here.