Objectives of the service
PLESS demonstration project aims to further develop Eart Observation – based services and assess their commercial viability for the identification of floating marine plastics, in support of reducing environmental impact of marine litter.
The consortium working on Plastic-Less Society is further developing marine pollution focused services that combine satellite data and oceanographic models to produce added-value information on marine pollution in the form of plastics.
The new developments are focused on the implementation of a super-resolution algorithm to improve the spatial resolution of Sentinel 2 images, ultimately aiming to improve the project services’ marine plastics detection capabilities.
Users and their needs
A distinct set of users / costumers from different segments have been engaged, helping on the consolidation of requirements that are being used to tailor the services’ development.
The most relevant needs that have been identified include:
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Surveying floating marine debris and support to plastic collection actions.
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Monitoring of marine plastics in port areas and establishment of early warning systems
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Supporting the assessment of the environmental state of the areas of interest (touristic areas, protected areas, etc.)
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Assess the origin and potential destination of floating marine plastics
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Identify areas prone to the accumulation of floating plastics
The engaged users are from Portugal, Spain and Argentina, thus covering both sides of the Atlantic Ocean:
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Cascais Ambiente (https://ambiente.cascais.pt/)
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Authority Port of Vigo (https://www.apvigo.es/)
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Fundación Patagonia Natural (https://patagonianatural.org.ar/)
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INIDEP (https://www.argentina.gob.ar/inidep)
Service/ system concept
The PLESS demonstration project is being implemented having as reference an EO based marine plastic identification service that GMV has been developing for the last years. The PLESS services combines satellite data, ground truth data and oceanographic models to produce added-value products for the project users.
In addition, the PLESS services are being implemented in an a Geobrowser to which the project users have access, and that allows them, in a fully autonomous way, to request and get access to the outputs of the project services.
The PLESS services are:
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Marine Plastic Detection based on satellite data - providing continuous monitoring of floating marine plastics on users’ selected areas of interest.
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Marine Plastic Tracking based on detection service - providing continuous monitoring of floating marine plastics on users’ selected areas of interest together with ocean circulation models, aiming to understand where plastics are headed and where they can come from.
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Single order request service - to identify areas prone / not prone for floating marine plastics accumulation
These services are leveraged by a service chain (image below) that has been developed by GMV, which combines various types of data (earth observation imagery, ground truth data, ocean circulation models) to output the location of patches of marine floating plastics.
Space Added Value
This project is running based mainly in Earth Observation images, as they offer a relevant number of benefits:
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Possibility to generate multispectral compositions from various spectral bands allowing to distinguish the most common types of plastics
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Possibility of temporal analysis, allows monitoring of changes occurring in the places of interest, as well as the ability to analyse data from the past
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Digital image processing allows the production and analysis of results in a fast and automated way
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Reduction of monitoring costs when compared to traditional monitoring methods (e.g. vessel surveys), even more considering that only freely available imagery (Sentinel 2) will be used
Current Status
The project has reached the On Site Acceptance Test (SAT) and the pilot stage is now running, with all the project users with full access to the project Geobrowser.
Despite being a web-based tool, the Geobrowser has been tailored to offer advanced visualization options for the users, including time sliders for floating plastics position prediction.
For the SAT milestone, the consortium was able to generate the first set of Sentinel 2 based super-resolution images for the Vigo river area (example below). The remaining super resolution images (for the other project users and respective AoIs) are now being generated and will be uploaded to the Geobrowser.
