The Mare Nostrum NGO is a non-profit, apolitical, independent environmental association from Constanta, Romania, founded in 1993 at the initiative of several young specialists, from various fields related to marine research and environmental protection. In a spirit of partnership, Mare Nostrum works to raise public awareness, to educate about ecology and to advise decision-makers for effective environmental protection of the Black Sea and the Romanian coastal zone.
Reducing the amount of marine litter is one of the strategic objectives of Mare Nostrum. Its most important project in this field is the Marine Litter Monitoring program, a permanent and continuous project that keeps track of the amount of litter recorded on Romanian beaches.
The association's experience in this respect speaks for itself: the first monitoring of beach litter was organised in 1999, and since 2014 the monitoring has been carried out according to the European methodological standards. Thanks to the data collected as a partner in several European projects, the NGO Mare Nostrum has gathered an impressive volume of data on beach litter.
The Mare Nostrum NGO was eager to share its beach litter data with EMODnet Chemistry and thus to contribute to the European Marine Litter Data Base. As EMODnet Data Ingestion ambassador, the National Institute for Marine Research and Development "Grigore Antipa" (NIMRD) provided full support throughout the data submission using EMODnet services. With more than 130 data sets on beach, seabed and floating litter along the entire Romanian Black Sea coastline over a period of eight years, Mare Nostrum has become one of the most important providers of marine litter data in the Black Sea and a future Associate Partner of EMODnet.
