The NOAA Marine Debris Program is pleased to share the redeveloped Marine Debris Information Clearinghouse. The Marine Debris Information Clearinghouse, first launched in 2013, is designed to provide direct access to the marine debris community on projects completed or underway that can inform and improve their work. The Clearinghouse allows researchers and other active or interested partners to find projects and the results based on different project attributes, including location, project type, time frame, partner, or debris type. With many new groups joining the marine debris community and interest growing rapidly, collaboration and coordination are more important than ever in sharing successes, identifying gaps, and confirming best practices.
The new and improved version of the site builds off the NOAA Data Integration Visualization Exploration and Reporting (DIVER) platform to add new features and capabilities. The Clearinghouse provides new multi-faceted query tools that allow users to build their own searches to suit their specific interests. These search capabilities are paired with interactive data visualization tools that dynamically represent the relationship between project attributes and project results in multiple representations, making trends, signals and patterns visually apparent to users. For example, if you are interested in seeing all the projects NOAA Marine Debris Program funded on microplastics in your state, region or even across the United States for a certain time period, you can build that query in an advanced search. The results of that query can then be visualized spatially - showing you where the projects occurred, or graphically - showing you metrics of project outputs and context of how they fit with other efforts.
Over time, the Marine Debris Program plans to continue to evolve the site with additional features and content sets. We encourage you to take a look and reach back to us with any feedback on ways we can improve the site with an email to marinedebris.clearinghouse@noaa.gov.
