Fulmar Litter Monitoring in the Netherlands – Update 2021

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 micro-particles 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). In 2020 the fulmar EcoQO was formally replaced and is now called Fulmar Threshold Value (Fulmar-TV or FTV; for more details see Van Franeker et al. 2021 and Kühn et al. 2021a).

This report adds new data for year 2021 to the previous report (Kühn et al. 2021a). A total of 81 fulmar corpses were collected, of which 71 were suitable for monitoring.