Monitoring Sea Current and Marine litter Transport using a low cost approaches

This paper describes how to use, in an innovative way, modern ‘consumer’ electronic technologies for wireless communication to achieve a marine monitoring system with low hardware costs, near-zero maintenance costs, and low power consumption, compared to systems based on single drifters with satellite communication. The development of newly developed oceanographic drifters that can be used for mesoscale monitoring of marine currents and for further applications (recovery of people/materials at sea, pollutant spills, marine litter dispersion) is described, together with much simpler but highly effective marine litter tracking systems for monitoring, in coastal waters, marine litter coming out of rivers, with open source systems and applicable with a citizen-science approach.