The user organisation
Venice Lagoon Plastic Free (VLPF) is a non-profit organization based in Venice (Italy), listed on the National Single Third Sector Registry (RUNTS), the EMODnet data providers list, supporter of the WWF Plastic Smart City Initiative and signatory of the EU Charter Restore our Ocean and Water mission. The VLPF team is the co-designer of the REMEDIES Shoreline ML App together with Infordata Sistemi (Italy), developed under the Horizon Europe REMEDIES project. VLPF functions as a catalyzer of social and technological innovation against marine litter and plastics pollution using the World Heritage site of Venice and its Lagoon as a living laboratory.
VLPF is committed to:
- Design, develop, implement, and promote local, national and international projects/networks to catalyze resources and expertise for plastic pollution prevention and remediation measures, within a circular economy approach.
- Operate decentralized large-scale clean-ups in the city of Venice, its lagoon, including nearby mainland towns and cities.
- Promote public debates and awareness initiatives with different stakeholders to raise awareness of the danger of plastic pollution, encouraging the uptake of good practices along with individual and collective actions.
- Carry out independent environmental monitoring initiatives in the waters of Venice, in cooperation with research/educational institutes and centers.
Challenges faced by the user and EMODnet services used
EMODnet was used to retrieve relevant historical marine litter data in order to plan and enrich our work on the pan European marine litter database and have the benefit to get standardised, homogenous and comparable data from elsewhere, as well as data gaps. In addition, downloaded data are used for advanced statistics and data comparison during the development of the Beach Litter Monitoring App. EMODnet also provided valuable services such as the beach litter format validator, which assisted in generating correct datasets that then were submitted to the EMODnet ingestion portal. In the future, we plan to use EMODnet web services for automatic data exchange, further enhancing our ability to manage and analyze marine litter data effectively.
Impact of EMODnet
By developing the Beach Litter Monitoring App that acquires, stores, and aggregates data on marine litter pollution, VLPF as a lighthouse test site and Remedies demo sites can leverage citizen science, where members of the public involved in i.e., beach clean-ups can also actively engage in scientific research.
©Remedies project 2024
Acknowledgments
The upgraded version of Beach Litter Monitoring App has been developed under the REMEDIES project that received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Innovation Action under grant agreement number 101093964.