Marine litter case study dataset

This document is MINKE’s Deliverable 8.2 “Marine litter case study dataset”. The aim of the present deliverable is to provide and describe the marine litter dataset that was selected by the WP8 team as a case study to test different unsupervised clustering methods and to develop a pollution index that can serve to harmonize beach litter abundance and composition data. The selected case study corresponds to the dataset generated by the citizen science program Científicos de la Basura, by means of sampling macrolitter (i.e. > 2.5 cm) on several Chilean beaches on an every-four-years basis since 2008. The actual and complete dataset is provided in XLSX format via its DOI and URL (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6678405), as it is publicly available on the open-access repository zenodo.org. We also indicate how the dataset should be correctly cited and referenced, in case that any person or entity might need to use the data. A description of its main characteristics, examples of the main research questions that can be answered with it, and a description of its metadata are also provided in the present report.