Marcus Schulz, Daniel Neumann, David M. Fleet, Michael Matthies, A 
multi-criteria evaluation system for marine litter pollution based on 
statistical analyses of OSPAR beach litter monitoring time series, 
Marine Environmental Research, Volume 92, December 2013, Pages 61-70, 
ISSN 0141-1136, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.marenvres.2013.08.013.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0141113613001475)
Abstract: During the last decades, marine pollution with anthropogenic 
litter has become a worldwide major environmental concern. Standardized 
monitoring of litter since 2001 on 78 beaches selected within the 
framework of the Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment 
of the North-East Atlantic (OSPAR) has been used to identify temporal 
trends of marine litter. Based on statistical analyses of this dataset a 
two-part multi-criteria evaluation system for beach litter pollution of 
the North-East Atlantic and the North Sea is proposed. Canonical 
correlation analyses, linear regression analyses, and non-parametric 
analyses of variance were used to identify different temporal trends. A 
classification of beaches was derived from cluster analyses and served 
to define different states of beach quality according to abundances of 
17 input variables. The evaluation system is easily applicable and 
relies on the above-mentioned classification and on significant temporal 
trends implied by significant rank correlations.
Keywords: Marine litter; Canonical correlation analysis; Temporal trend; 
Cluster analysis; Classification system; Beach evaluation