SeaKeepers at the Pocket Yacht Knot Rendezvous

Overview

On April 5th-6th, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society's Program Development Manager, Aubri Keith, and Chief of Fleet Operations, Dick Seidenspinner attended the Pocket Yacht Knot Rendezvous at the Dania Beach Marina to share SeaKeepers' mission and programs with rendezvous attendees as a part of their educational seminars. SeaKeepers also hosted a beach cleanup on Dania Beach. We were joined by 20 volunteers from both the rendezvous and SeaKeepers' Junior SeaKeepers Program who set out to clean as much of the beach as they could and were able to remove 55.5 pounds of ocean bound debris from the beach. Our volunteers were also able to collect data to be shared with scientists on the most common types of trash through the use of citizen-science app Marine Debris Tracker. We give a huge thanks to our volunteers for joining us and for their incredible work and hope to see them at some of our future cleanups!

Marine Debris Tracker is a data collection app that allows the general public to contribute to an open-date platform and scientific research by recording the different types of litter, specifically plastic pollution, that they find in either inland or marine environments. Marine Debris Tracker was developed by the University of Georgia’s Jambeck Research Group, which SeaKeepers worked with in 2021 when the Jambeck Research Group collaborated with Ocean Conservancy to assess Miami’s plastic waste management, known as a Circularity Assessment Protocol. SeaKeepers again assisted the Jambeck Research Group’s Circularity Informatics Lab in 2022 with another Circularity Assessment Protocol in the Florida Keys. The researchers of the Jambeck Lab use the Marine Debris Tracker app to record their data, and with citizen scientists also using the app, more data can be collected in different areas. Using Marine Debris Tracker at our cleanups involves community members in creating a bigger picture of plastic pollution, and provides the means for new scientific findings to be generated as well as for effective local legislation to be informed. SeaKeepers is excited to be incorporating this app at our cleanups and continue our mission of coastal education, protection, and restoration. In this cleanup, 46 percent of volunteers participated in using the app to record data.