The drivers (social) and pressures (physical) of marine debris have typically been examined separately. We redress this by using social and beach surveys at nine Tasmanian beaches, across three coastlines and within three categories of urbanisation, to examine whether people acknowledge that their actions contribute to the issue of marine debris, and whether these social drivers are reflected i...

From mid June 2010 to early August 2010, the white sandy beaches along Alabama’s Gulf coast were inundated with crude oil discharged from the Deepwater Horizon well. The long-term consequences of this environmental catastrophe are still unfolding. Although BP has attempted to clean up some of these beaches, there still exist many unanswered questions regarding the physical, chemical, and ecolog...

We introduce the use of remote sensing analysis in providing new insight in characterizing green turtle nesting habitat. A maximum likelihood classification (MLC) and a multiple endmember spectral mixture analysis (MESMA) were conducted on a Landsat image that contained six nesting beaches in Turkey that represent varying degrees of importance. Both techniques highlighted similarities of the ve...

Coarse-grained beaches are particularly prevalent in the UK, composed of accumulations of either gravel, or mixed sand and gravel sediments. Understanding and predicting their morphological behaviour in response to short-term and long-term forcing has been the subject of recent research. Despite the focus on sandy beaches, it is important to understand that the balance of processes that govern ...

A variety of extended-spectrum Beta-lactamase-producing Escherichia coli isolates, with a high rate of cefotaximase-15 resistance, were identified in seagull feces from Porto, Portugal, beaches. Beaches may therefore present a risk to public health because of the potential pathogen-spreading capacity of migratory birds.

Microbial source tracking is an area of research in which multiple approaches are used to identify the sources of elevated bacterial concentrations in recreational lakes and beaches. At our study location in Darwin, northern Australia, water quality in the harbor is generally good, however dry-season beach closures due to elevated Escherichia coli and enterococci counts are a cause for concern....

Litter categories and grades of Welsh beaches were satisfactorily predicted by multi-layered feed forward neural networks and fuzzy systems, which are artificial intelligence techniques. Neural network structures with hidden layers consisting of 40 neurons of uni-bipolar sigmoid functions were constructed for Welsh beaches and they were trained by supervised (conjugate gradient) learning algori...

The results are described of ongoing field and laboratory experiments to estimate losses from shingle beaches due to abrasion. Field abrasion experiments of two exotic lithologies (quartzite and limestone) used as tracers on two flint shingle beaches at Telscombe and Saltdean in East Sussex, UK, have been carried out over 23 months, resulting in 985 weight loss measurements. Relationships betwe...

The species composition and infection levels were determined for helminth parasites in the mole crab, Emerita rathbunae, collected from seven sandy beaches from Guerrero and Michoacán, México. A total of 494 crabs were collected between August and December of 2009. The number of crabs that were examined from each beach varied from 40 in Lázaro Cárdenas to 114 in El Revolcadero. The cephalothora...