Fulmar Litter EcoQO monitoring in the Netherlands - Update 2017

Marine debris has serious economic and ecological consequences. Economic impacts are most severe for coastal communities, tourism, shipping and fisheries. Marine wildlife suffers from entanglement and ingestion of debris, with microparticles potentially affecting marine food chains up to the level of human consumers. In the North Sea, marine litter problems were firmly recognized in 2002 when surrounding states assigned to OSPAR the task to include marine plastic litter in its system of Ecological Quality Objectives (EcoQOs) (North Sea Ministerial Conference 2002). At that time, in the Netherlands, marine litter was already monitored by the abundance of plastic debris in stomachs of a seabird species, the Northern Fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis). Fulmars are purely offshore foragers that ingest all sorts of litter from the sea surface and normally do not regurgitate poorly degradable diet components like plastics. Initial size of ingested debris is usually in the range of millimetres to centimetres, but may be considerably larger for flexible items as for instance threadlike or sheetlike materials. Items must gradually wear down in the muscular stomach to a size small enough to pass into the intestines. During this process, plastics accumulate in the stomach to a level that integrates litter levels encountered in their foraging area for a period of probably up to a few weeks. The Dutch monitoring approach using beached fulmars was developed for international implementation by OSPAR as one of its EcoQOs for the North Sea (OSPAR 2008, 2009, 2010a,b; Van Franeker et al. 2011). This approach is now also implemented as an indicator for ‘Good Environmental Status (GES)’ in the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) (EC 2008, 2010; Galgani et al. 2010; MSFD-TSML 2011, 2013). International guidelines on the monitoring methods and data presentation have been published (OSPAR 2015a,b) and were implemented in the recent ‘Intermediate Assessment’ (OSPAR 2017). OSPAR has identified a long-term (undated) target for ecological quality as: “There should be less than 10% of Northern Fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis) having 0.1 gram or more plastic in the stomach in samples of 50-100 beached fulmars from each of 5 different areas of the North Sea over a period of at least 5 years”. The European MSFD aims for Good Environmental Status (GES) by the year 2020 and defines GES for marine litter as the situation in which “properties and quantities of marine litter do not cause harm to the coastal and marine environment”. The concept of ‘no harm’ is difficult to quantify (Rochman et al. 2016; Werner et al. 2016) but member states involved in fulmar monitoring tend to hold on to the OSPAR target as a long-term perspective, with a short-term requirement for quantifiable or significant change towards that target by 2020. For European marine areas where fulmars do not occur, other species are needed as ingestion indicators, for which methodology and targets are being developed (e.g. Matiddi et al. 2017; Pham et al. 2017). The monitoring system uses fulmars found dead on beaches, often slowly starved but also accidentally killed e.g. as in fisheries bycatch. In a pilot study, it has been shown that the amount of plastic in stomachs of slowly starved beached birds was not statistically different from that of healthy birds killed in instantaneous accidents in the same area. Standard procedures for dissection and stomach analyses have been documented in a manual, reports, scientific literature and condensed OSPAR guidelines. Although the standard EcoQO guidelines have been designed to provide detailed data analyses and statistics, the focus of this summary report is on the most policy relevant aspect: that is the proportion of fulmars exceeding a threshold level of 0.1 gram of plastic in the stomachs (EcoQO performance, or EcoQO%). The long-term policy target in the above definition is thus that the EcoQO% will be reduced to under 10%. Full details on e.g. different categories of industrial plastics (the raw granular feedstock for producers) as opposed to user plastics (from all sorts of consumer waste) are dealt with in the detailed results & discussion chapter of this report.