Send message to Authors

Short Abstract

Plastic Pirates Belgium engages youth in monitoring plastic pollution across Europe. The project highlights challenges in sustaining engagement, ensuring data quality, and fostering inclusivity, offering lessons for more equitable and impactful blue citizen science.

Abstract

Plastic Pirates Belgium is a citizen science initiative engaging young people in monitoring plastic pollution across European rivers and coastlines, thereby linking local action to continental-scale insights. While the project has demonstrated the power of collective effort, it also illustrates key challenges that resonate broadly within blue citizen science.

First, sustaining participant motivation over time requires balancing educational benefits with real impact, ensuring that young citizens feel their contributions matter beyond the sampling moment. Second, achieving and maintaining quality data suitable for purpose (i.e., litter monitoring) in a project spanning diverse cultural, language and educational contexts requires robust protocols, teachers’ support, and clear quality-control mechanisms supervised by experts. Finally, fostering inclusiveness remains a priority: participation must be accessible across linguistic, socioeconomic, and geographic barriers to truly represent Europe’s diverse context.

This contribution will reflect on the strategies employed and lessons learned from Plastic Pirates Belgium while inviting discussion on how the broader blue citizen science community can collectively address these three intertwined challenges. By confronting issues of engagement, data quality, and inclusivity, the project seeks to inform more sustainable and equitable citizen science practices for ocean and freshwater stewardship.