Every year, millions of metric tons of plastic waste end up in oceans, harming hundreds of species and their ecosystems. Most of this waste comes from land-based sources that leak into watersheds.
Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers said that efforts to address this issue require better understanding of where people dispose of waste on land.
Current resources to detect and monitor such sites - both official sites and informal or illegal ones - are lacking.
In recent years, the use of computational tools such as neural networks have been used to analyse satellite data to get a greater understanding of the Earth’s surface.
Researcher Caleb Kruse, of Earthrise Media, California, developed a new system of neural networks to analyse data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellites and demonstrated its potential for use in monitoring waste sites on land.
To evaluate the performance of the new system, the researchers first applied it to Indonesia...