Progress in Research on Marine Litter-Related Monitoring Technologies

Abstract

The problem of marine litter pollution is becoming increasingly serious and has become one of the important global environmental issues. From the perspective of source and sink, floating riverine litter (FRL) is the main source of floating marine litter (FML), while beach litter (BL) and FML are the source and sink of each other. It is necessary to research the transformation mechanism and collaborative governance policy among these three kinds of marine litter, based on accurate monitoring data. However, conventional monitoring methods have problems such as high labor costs, insufficient representativeness and poor comparability. Hence, developing efficient and intelligent monitoring technology is the focus of recent future. Since 2018, monitoring technique of marine litter relevant research literature has grown rapidly, showing this technique a hot spot. In this paper, the relevant research literature is divided into three litter types (BL, FML, and FRL) and two ways (fixed monitoring and mobile monitoring). Similarities and differences in research focus, platform selection, result accuracy and result application are summarized and reasoned, with a view to accelerating the research progress and better supporting BL, FML, and FRL control in China.