LitterWatch

LitterWatch Victoria is a publicly accessible web portal to manage and view litter monitoring datasets contributed by community group and agencies. It collates publicly contributed and state-wide datasets of litter in Victoria that can be easily visualised and used for reporting, planning, policy making and engagement.

LitterWatch Victoria website		LitterWatch Victoria Mapping Portal

Background

The management of litter is a strategic priority under the Port Phillip Bay Environment Management Plan , with litter clean-up estimated to cost over $94 million annually. Since 2017, the Port Phillip Bay fund has invested over $2.7 million in litter monitoring. The LitterWatch portal was designed and created to assist in identifying the different monitoring programs, and to secure the collated data.

LitterWatch is intended to support the development of a litter baseline, and other activities under the Port Phillip Bay Environmental Management Plan , including plastic pollution policies. The portal has reporting functionality and program analysis, which facilitates access by the public to data on litter hotspots across Port Phillip Bay.

LitterWatch is an initiative of the Victorian Government’s Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA), in collaboration with CeRDI.

Outcomes

The development of LitterWatch Victoria involved extensive baseline research examining litter monitoring methods and litter pollution data for the Port Phillip region. A feature of the original project was the development of a standardised litter monitoring database and online spatial information system, which includes the federation of community and agency litter monitoring data.

One of the goals of LitterWatch Victoria has been to improve the connection across litter monitoring programs and federate datasets from different custodians into a single platform where it can be simultaneously viewed and interrogated. To this end, in 2021 the Beach Patrol mobile application Litterstopper was integrated to the LitterWatch platform via creation of an API to allow data feeds from Litterstopper directly to LitterWatch.

In 2022, the LitterWatch Victoria portal received significant investment from DEECA in partnership with Melbourne Water and RMIT to include the Melbourne Water litter monitoring programs conducted under the Healthy Waterway Strategy. The key aspects of this project were significant changed and upgrades to the data entry system as well as substantive backend changes. This was the first time CeRDI had utilised progressive web-app technology to develop bespoke tools for end users.

The LitterWatch project was expanded further in 2024 with the commencement of a DEECA-supported industry HDR project to investigate the risk of macro litter to birdlife in the Greater Melbourne and Port Phillip region. Hannah Faraone is undertaking this PhD project under the supervision of Dr Birgita Hansen, Dr Nick Schultz, Dr jackie Myers (RMIT) and DEECA project lead Kimberley MacDonald.

The development of LitterWatch Victoria also included an honours research project on litter monitoring methods, conducted by Hamish McDonough and completed in 2019.

The litter data categorisation undertaken during the project now underpins standards used across the region and by DEECA for reporting.

Technical Features

The mapping page provides simple analytical tools to compare litter data from various locations and time periods, based on repeat surveys conducted by groups and agencies in various parts of Port Phillip. The user administration system allows coordinators from community litter monitoring groups to manage member training levels and verification of member-contributed data, ensuring that quality assurance and quality control processes are implemented prior to site litter data being shared publicly. This has helped ensure that community-generated litter monitoring data is fit-for-purpose. The mapping portal guides reporting, planning, policy making and engagement in relation to litter pullulation and control. The first version of LitterWatch Victoria went live in July 2020.

The Litterstopper integration involved creation of an API on the LitterWatch site which allows LitterStopper to feed data into LitterWatch. The API allows LitterStopper to push a well-formed JSON object into LitterWatch. 

Integration of the Melbourne Water litter monitoring program was a significant technical step forward for CeRDI’s tools and platforms. A key deliverable was the creation of an offline data entry system, which is crucial for fieldwork where the network connection is unreliable. Instead of a traditional mobile app, a progressive web app (PWA) was developed - an innovative technology that operates seamlessly across devices and platforms from a single codebase. The PWA allows users to enter survey data even when offline, ensuring uninterrupted data collection. This capability has been enabled by leveraging advanced web technologies, including the Service Worker API, Caching, IndexedDB, and Local Storage. These tools ensure reliable offline functionality and seamless synchronization once connectivity is restored.

The new LitterWatch App was launched in October 2024 and is intended to replace the existing browser-based data entry system. To this end it has been designed to accommodate all existing group methods, in addition to the new Healthy Waterway Strategy method. This is the first time CeRDI has developed an ‘App’ and heralds a new era for the centre in developing data systems that can more broadly meet user needs, and increase the flexibility and utility of CeRDI platforms for decision-making, knowledge sharing and data management.

Approach

LitterWatch Victoria was led by CeRDI’s Dr Birgita Hansen with significant input from members from the CeRDI’s research support and technical teams, particularly Scott Limmer, Andrew Macleod, Sudeera Abeywickrema and Dr Angela Neyland. In 2021 and 2022, updates were made to the LitterWatch system to allow the import of data collected by the LitterStopper App . This work was conducted by Richard Archer and Michael Brown in the technical team. The technical team, in partnership with DEECA and with input from representatives of key community litter monitoring groups, developed an online spatial ‘litter data portal’ designed to capture litter data in a standardised and reportable format.

In commenting on the development and design of the project Birgita said,

A huge amount of work has gone into developing this system, and ensuring we accommodate different end user needs. Through ongoing liaison with a range of stakeholders, particularly our key community partners Beach Patrol, Bellarine Catchment Network and Port Phillip EcoCentre, we have designed a system that is intended to accommodate different litter data collection techniques while still enabling standardisation across datasets.

In 2023-2024, technical team member Sudeera Abyewickrema worked closely with previous team member Scott Limmer and DEECA, RMIT and Melbourne Water to design and build the LitterWatch progressive web-app. Extensive testing was done by members of all organisations to ensure the best possible outcome and seamless data entry offline.

Future Directions

LitterWatch is the primary source of information that DEECA is drawing on to develop a litter index for the Port Phillip Bay Environmental Management Plan (EMP) 2017-2027. LitterWatch data is being used to help create a spatially explicit Litter Index that incorporates baselines and thresholds intended to trigger management intervention. The development of the progressive web app functionality will help facilitate greater end use through access to the data entry system offline. This will allow extension of the tool across Victoria.

With Hannah’s bird-litter research program the LitterWatch Victoria project will be aiming to link litter monitoring data with citizen science bird monitoring data, to better understand the impacts of anthropogenic litter on wildlife.

The next stage for this project is to improve the FAIRness of litter data. To this end, the litter classification system will be used to develop a vocabulary for anthropogenic macro-litter.