Monthly Margaret Pace Park Cleanup

Overview

On the morning of May 25, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with M.O.R.A.E.S of South Florida to host our monthly cleanup at Margaret Pace Park in Downtown Miami. M.O.R.A.E.S is a non-profit organization in South Florida committed to the understanding, viability, and protection of our local marine environment through conservation and research. We were joined by 28 volunteers this month who we met near the shoreline of the park to give a quick site briefing as well as background information about SeaKeepers and M.O.R.A.E.S and how volunteers can remain involved with these organizations. Our volunteers then picked up their gear and spread out all over the park, a great deal of them focusing on the shoreline as it is usually inundated with trash from storms and the nearby picnic islands in the bay. As our volunteers collected massive amounts of trash from the mangroves and terrestrial areas of the park alike, some collected data on the types of trash picked up through the use of the Citizen Science app Marine Debris Tracker. After just two hours of hard work, our volunteers collected over 335 pounds of trash from the park, with plastic beverage bottles, bottle caps and cups being the most commonly collected items. A few of our volunteers even managed to remove some uncommon items like a barricade floating by the shoreline, as well as a bucket that appeared to be full of oil. We are grateful to M.O.R.A.E.S of South Florida for partnering with us on this cleanup and would also like to give a huge thanks to our volunteers for joining us on an early Sunday morning and contributing to an incredibly successful cleanup!

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, 29 percent of volunteers participated in using the app to record data.