Love Our Ocean Cleanup

On Saturday, February 14, 2026, The International SeaKeepers Society hosted our Love Our Ocean cleanup in honor of Valentine’s Day at Historic Virginia Key Beach Park. Our team met with Maya and Luiz of the Park’s Education and Volunteer Coordinators to introduce the history of the site as well as give a quick safety briefing. 67 volunteers joined us from all over South Florida as well as many of our Junior SeaKeepers to give back to their community on a day of love and celebration. Throughout the cleanup we asked our volunteers to sort out any pieces of trash that were red and pink in color. After a music festival on the grounds the week before our volunteers got right to work collecting 162 lbs of trash in two hours, the most interesting piece included an entire metal hammock frame. We wrapped up our holiday cleanup by sending our volunteers off with homemade SeaKeepers valentines and post cards, as well as creating a red and pink trash heart in the sand. We are so grateful for all the hard work and dedication of our volunteers, and many thanks to our friends at Historic Virginia Key Beach Park.

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, 25% of volunteers participated in using the app to record data.