DOI: 10.13120/294048d4-d820-4433-80d8-a87531904ac9
title: Beach litter - Median number of cigarette related items normalized per 100m & to 1 survey - without UNEP_MARLIN - EU-MSFD monitoring 2001/2023 v2025
title: bl_cigarette_monitoring

description: This visualization product displays the cigarette related items abundance of marine macro-litter (&gt; 2.5cm) per beach per year from Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) monitoring surveys without UNEP-MARLIN data.


EMODnet Chemistry included the collection of marine litter in its 3rd phase. Since the beginning of 2018, data of beach litter have been gathered and processed in the EMODnet Chemistry Marine Litter Database (MLDB).

The harmonization of all the data has been the most challenging task considering the heterogeneity of the data sources, sampling protocols and reference lists used on a European scale.


Preliminary processings were necessary to harmonize all the data:

- Exclusion of OSPAR 1000 protocol: in order to follow the approach of OSPAR that it is not including these data anymore in the monitoring;

- Selection of MSFD surveys only (exclusion of other monitoring, cleaning and research operations);

- Exclusion of beaches without coordinates;

- Selection of cigarette related items only. The list of selected items is attached to this metadata. This list was created using EU Marine Beach Litter Baselines, the European Threshold Value for Macro Litter on Coastlines and the Joint list of litter categories for marine macro-litter monitoring from JRC (these three documents are attached to this metadata);

- Exclusion of surveys referring to the UNEP-MARLIN list: the UNEP-MARLIN protocol differs from the other types of monitoring in that cigarette butts are surveyed in a 10m square. To avoid comparing abundances from very different protocols, the choice has been made to distinguish in two maps the cigarette related items results associated with the UNEP-MARLIN list from the others;

- Normalization of survey lengths to 100m & 1 survey / year: in some case, the survey length was not exactly 100m, so in order to be able to compare the abundance of litter from different beaches a normalization is applied using this formula:

Number of cigarette related items of the survey (normalized by 100 m) = Number of cigarette related items of the survey x (100 / survey length)

Then, this normalized number of cigarette related items is summed to obtain the total normalized number of cigarette related items for each survey. Finally, the median abundance of cigarette related items for each beach and year is calculated from these normalized abundances of cigarette related items per survey.

Sometimes the survey length was null or equal to 0. Assuming that the MSFD protocol has been applied, the length has been set at 100m in these cases.

Percentiles 50, 75, 95 & 99 have been calculated taking into account cigarette related items from MSFD monitoring data (excluding UNEP-MARLIN protocol) for all years.


More information is available in the attached documents.


Warning: the absence of data on the map does not necessarily mean that they do not exist, but that no information has been entered in the Marine Litter Database for this area.