Are you a student or teacher with a passion for art, our ocean, and Great Lakes? Then break out your art supplies because we need YOUR help to raise awareness about marine debris! This year’s NOAA Marine Debris Program Art Contest is officially open.

It’s fall! For those of us in the temperate parts of the country, this means temperatures are getting cooler and the leaves are changing color. Those beautiful red, orange, and yellow leaves are also starting to fall, covering our yards and sidewalks. Some love crunching through the leaves. For others, it's a big chore to rake all of them up. No matter your view, you should be aware that those leaves can potentially transport debris.  

You can learn all about monitoring in the latest video in our Trash Talk series, Trash Counts. It follows a group of high school students as they monitor the beaches in their community for marine debris. Their data, as well as data from other citizen scientists and classrooms all around the world, can help us figure out the most effective ways stop debris from entering the ocean and Great Lakes.  

Happy Public Lands Day! To celebrate, we are highlighting the astounding success of a public lands project that has prevented thousands of tons of debris from entering the ocean. In the southwest corner of the continental United States, our partners at the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR) and Southwest Wetlands Interpretive Association (SWIA) are leading bi-national efforts to reduce the impacts of marine debris in the Tijuana River Valley. Many factors make it hard to address marine debris in this region, but success has risen out of a strong community of partners on both sides of the border.

Rising to the challenge, teenagers from across the country designed and led creative campaigns in their communities to tackle the marine litter problem as part of Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Program’s Marine Debris Creative Advocacy Competition, supported by the NOAA Marine Debris Program.

Disappointed you missed the International Coastal Cleanup (ICC)? Or maybe you had so much fun you wish you could participate in the ICC all the time? Good news! You can host your own community cleanup anytime, no matter where you live.

The NOAA Marine Debris Program is proud to announce our FY19 “Marine Debris Research” federal funding opportunity. This opportunity provides funding for research directly related to marine debris through field, laboratory, and modeling experiments. Successful project proposals will explore the ecological risk associated with marine debris, determine debris exposure levels, examine the fate and transport of marine debris in nearshore coastal environments, and/or quantify habitat impacts resulting from marine debris. Projects may address one or more of these research priorities and should be original, hypothesis-driven projects that have not previously been addressed to scientific standards.

The Channel Islands are found in the Santa Barbara Channel in Southern California. Although the heavily urbanized mainland coastline of the Channel is home to over 18 million people, the shorelines of the islands are rugged, isolated, and provide critical habitat for endangered birds, foxes, plants, and more that are only found here. Although uninhabited, these sensitive island shorelines are plagued by large amounts of marine debris that vary in type from consumer debris like food packaging to fishing nets.In an effort to tackle this debris, California State University Channel Island’s (CSUCI) Santa Rosa Island Research Station (SRIRS) staff, faculty, and students have been working to monitor and remove marine debris from portions of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands since 2015. With support from the NOAA Marine Debris Program, over 3,000 pounds of debris have been removed from the islands, but it is no easy feat.