An ArcGIS Dashboard for Combating the Rise of Ocean Plastic to our Beaches

Seventy-five percent of ocean plastic is found on beaches, including the beaches focused on in this report, the San Diego and Tijuana beaches. If plastic continues to reach the oceans from those beaches, it will degrade the marine environment as well as overall human health. To try and spread awareness regarding this problem, the "Tracking Plastics Heading to San Diego Beaches" dashboard was created as part of the OpenOceans Global: California Coast project, which aims to reduce the amount of ocean plastic on the San Diego County and Tijuana Municipality beaches. The project visualizing the pathways of ocean plastic that is accumulating on those beaches as well as the use of that visualization to help reduce the number of plastics, also helps tackle the problem of ocean plastic stranded on these beaches, which in turn will help protect the marine environment and overall human health. By digitizing the San Diego beaches and finding out potential plastic contamination points, through methods such as finding the connecting storm drains from San Diego County cities, this helped the clients from OpenOceans find out where the processes of plastic reaching the beaches could be mitigated.