Give Thanks to Biscayne Bay Cleanup

On Sunday, November 23, 2025, The International SeaKeepers Society partnered with Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation to host a cleanup at Matheson Hammock Park and Marina. With Thanksgiving approaching, we took the time to give back to our community and our ocean by removing debris from our coastlines. We were joined by 55 volunteers at the park who gathered to listen to a safety briefing and grabbed gloves, tongs, buckets and bags to prepare them to remove debris. Volunteers set out all over the park to look for garbage, including the natural atoll and coastline, the docks, and the mangroves near the boat ramp where a lot of debris gathers. Throughout the cleanup, volunteers returned with bags and buckets full of debris to be disposed of, with the top items reported being plastic fragments, bottle caps and food wrappers. We even found some odd objects like the drawers of a dresser. By the end of the cleanup, volunteers had removed more than 270 pounds of trash from the park and the marina, leaving behind a cleaner community and ecosystem for all to enjoy. Thank you so much to the Miami-Dade Parks and Recreation team for their collaboration at this event, as well as all the volunteers who came out and did their part for our ocean!

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, 27% of volunteers participated in using the app to record data.