Marine Pollution Bulletin 168 (2021) 112457

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Marine Pollution Bulletin

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/marpolbul

Marine plastic litter detection offshore Hawai'i by Sentinel-2

Achille Carlo Ciappa
e-GEOS, via Tiburtina 965, Rome, Italy

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Marine litter patches were detected from Sentinel-2 offshore Hawaii's Big Island (Hawaii) within 10 miles from
Marine plastic litter the coast in the prevalent windward direction (NE), for a total sea surface of 3.0 km2. The patches have a
Sentinel-2 filament-like shape with different orientation, lengths of several kilometers and width from tens to hundreds of
Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP)
meters. A comparison with the typical spectra of “sargassum” and “seaweed” patches emphasized differences in
Hawai'i
the red edge portion of the spectrum for large part of the filaments. Frequency of plastic pollution on Hawaiian
beaches and spectral characteristics of the filaments suggest these patches largely consist of plastic debris. A
detection method of plastic litter for Sentinel-2 data resampled at 20 m resolution based on the analysis of the red
edge bands is proposed.

1. Introduction
The accumulation of plastic litter in the sea is an added stress to
benthic, pelagic and littoral marine ecosystems. A significant amount of
plastic produced serves only ephemeral purposes, is rapidly converted
into waste, and represents a persistent form of marine pollution. The
mitigation measure - reducing plastic pollution at the source - would
require the identification of geographical sources, such as rivers, lagoons
or specific coastal sites. It has been estimated that about 30% of marine
litter floats on the surface or in the water column; the rest sinks to the
bottom floor (UNEP, 2005; 2019). Implementing frequent satellite ob­
servations of floating plastics might help trace the origins of pollution,
and recently significant efforts have been made to establish satellite
monitoring, as auspicated by several authors (Garaba and Dierssen,
2018; Garaba et al., 2020; Maximenko et al., 2019; Goddijn-Murphy
et al., 2018; Martínez-Vicente et al., 2019).
Sentinel-2 satellite of the Copernicus Program of European Space
Agency (ESA) is a potential candidate for the monitoring of surface
plastic debris. It provides free-of-charge multi-spectral data at spatial
resolution of 10 and 20 m over a swath area of 290 km, while other
sensors have either too coarse spatial resolution, too low revisit time, or
the data costs too much to be used in actual monitoring. Sentinel-2 has
also the ability to distinguish “sargassum” and seaweed patches (Trag­
anos and Reinartz, 2018; Wang and Hu, 2021).
Many recent studies have tested the ability of Sentinel-2 in plastic
detection, but few used observations of actual oceanic patches. Indeed,
selecting satellite data relevant to marine plastic debris is no easy task.
Patches themselves are continually drifting, and even when detected,
their content remains unknown, “ground truth” being unavailable and
plastics most often intermingled with other materials (mostly of natural
origin). Moreover, thinner aggregates of marine litter (less than 10 m
wide) are not detected at the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2. Experi­
ments have been conducted using artificial plastic targets (Themistocl­
eous et al., 2020; Topouzelis et al., 2019, 2020), marine litter
accumulated in a port (Moshtaghi et al., 2021), mixed datasets of
oceanic patches and washed debris after a flooding (Biermann et al.,
2020), and oceanic patches of ‘sargassum’ and plastics (Kikaki et al.,
2020). A method to discriminate plastics from other types of floating
materials is illustrated in Biermann et al. (2020).
The opportunity to analyze a consistent satellite dataset of oceanic
plastic patches was provided by Sentinel-2 scenes acquired offshore
Hawaii on October 14, 2020 (Fig. 1). In these images wide and long
filaments of floating materials are visible in the prevalent windward
direction (NE). ‘Ground truth’ information is missing, but the bright
signature in the visible range and the recurrence of plastic pollution
reaching Hawaiian beaches suggest that the filaments might largely
consist of plastic debris. In this study, the spectral signature of the
floating material found offshore Hawaii has been compared with known
types of oceanic patches, in particular ‘sargassum’ macroalgae and
mixed materials of vegetal origin. Most of the material detected offshore
Hawaii showed differences in the red edge portion of the spectrum, and
said differences have been discussed and interpreted suggesting a
refinement of the methodology to detect plastics with Sentinel-2 data.
Moreover, the area offshore Hawaii, though only occasionally crossed by
filaments, deserves accurate analysis for future research. Indeed, spatial
resolution is crucial in satellite monitoring, and the filaments detected

E-mail address: achille.ciappa@fastwebnet.it.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2021.112457
Received 3 January 2021; Received in revised form 14 April 2021; Accepted 1 May 2021
Available online 8 May 2021
0025-326X/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
A.C. Ciappa Marine Pollution Bulletin 168 (2021) 112457

offshore Hawaii, huge in length and width, provide a large number of Table 1
samples at the spatial resolution of Sentinel-2. Sentinel-2 MSI bands.
Band Central wavelength Bandwidth Resolution Descriptor
2. Data and methods (nm) (nm) (m)

1 442.7 21 60 Aerosol
The European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-2 mission of the Coper­ 2 492.4 66 10 Blue
3 559.8 36 10 Green
nicus Program is a constellation of two twin satellites equipped with
4 664.6 31 10 Red
Multi-Spectral Instrument (MSI) which acquires 12 bands in visible, NIR 5 704.1 15 20 Red Edge 1
and SWIR spectral windows, listed in Table 1. The Top of Atmosphere 6 740.5 15 20 Red Edge 2
(TOA) reflectance product (level L1C) has been processed through the 7 782.8 20 20 Red Edge 3
ACOLITE Dark Spectrum Fitting (DSF) algorithm, correcting for atmo­ 8 832.8 106 10 NIR
8◦ 864.7 21 20 Narrow NIR
spheric and sun glint (Harmel et al., 2018; Vanhellemont, 2019). Further
9 945.1 20 60 Water
improvements in Standard Sen2cor atmospheric correction for aquatic vapour
applications should be forthcoming (Pflug et al., 2020). 10 1373.5 31 60 SWIR Cirrus
The data used are Sentinel-2 scenes acquired in different seas during 11 1613.7 91 20 SWIR1
12 2202.4 175 20 SWIR2
2020. The scenes selected offshore Hawaii are three of the nine tiles
acquired on 14 October 2020 shown in Fig. 1. Other two scenes were
used, one acquired on 8 May 2020 south of Dominican Island, Caribbean was the best ranked, followed by the Normalized Difference Vegetation
Sea, with extended “sargassum” patches, the other on 1 August 2020 in Index (NDVI):
North Adriatic, Mediterranean Sea, showing aggregates of mixed vegetal
materials and plastics at the mouth of a lagoon. Images and relative NDVI = (B8 − B4)/(B8 + B4)
details are illustrated in Section 3. In this study, the patches have been extracted in NIR (band 8), as any
After atmospheric correction, the Sentinel-2 data were resampled at floating material is brighter than the background sea. The used pro­
20 m spatial resolution. The reason is that the 10 m bands in the visible cedure was to apply a mask around the patch and to select pixels
portion of the spectrum (bands 2, 3, 4) and NIR (band 8) are not suffi­ brighter than 1.5 time the seawater signal. Advantages of this method
cient to discriminate the type of material, as discussed in Section 4. with respect to the use of spectral indexes are discussed in Section 4.
The next step was the extraction of the patches of floating materials, The next step was the extraction of the spectral signatures of the
without distinguishing the types. Themistocleous et al. (2020) investi­ three different datasets: the “sargassum” patches in the Caribbean Sea,
gated the efficiency of several spectral indexes using an artificial target the mixed patches with abundance of vegetal materials in North Adriatic
of plastic bottles located near shore, finding that the Plastic Index (PI): and the unknown filaments detected around Hawaii.
PI = B8/(B8 + B4) The next step was the discrimination of the type of material in the red
edge bands (Table 1). The first difference was found between pixels with

Fig. 1. Sentinel-2 mosaic on 14 October 2020 off east Big Island of Hawaii.

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A.C. Ciappa
increasing values in bands 5, 6 and 7 and pixels with chaotic (or not
ordered) values in these bands. The red edge (increasing values in bands
5, 6 and 7) is indicative of dense mats of floating vegetation (Gower
et al., 2006) and these pixels were classified as ‘floating vegetal’. This
class was further divided in ‘floating veg. 1’, with band 8 > band 7, and
‘floating veg. 2’, with band 8 < band 7, but the existing literature reports
no links between these features and known properties (aging, for
instance) of floating vegetal materials. The pixels without increasing
reflectance in bands 5, 6 and 7 were classified based on the peak, if
occurring in band 5, 6 or 7. The peak in the range 700–710 nm is typical
of submerged plants or floating plankton like cyanobacteria (Gower
et al., 1999), thus the pixels with a peak in band 5 were classified as
‘submerged vegetal’. The remaining pixels with peak in band 6 or band 7
were classified as ‘probably plastics’. This classification method was
applied to the three datasets of oceanic patches.
The obtained classification was finally compared to the method
described in Biermann et al. (2020) to discriminate plastics from other
materials such as seaweed, plastic, timber, foam, pumice. The method is
based on the combined use of the NDVI and the novel Floating Debris
Index (FDI), originated from the FAI index (Hu, 2009; Dogliotti et al.,
2018; Zhang et al., 2019) and expressed in terms of Sentinel-2 bands by:
′ selected pixels shown in Fig. 7a produced: 21% of ‘floating vegetal’,
FDI = B8 − R
′ (λB8 − λB4 )
R = B6 + (B11 − B6)∙
(λB11 − λR4 )
∙10
The authors indicate that NDVI provides more distinct cluttering of
materials than FDI, and that FDI primarily depends on the amount of
material in a given pixel.
3. Results
3.1. Spectral signature of “sargassum” and materials of vegetal origin
Patches of ‘sargassum’ macroalgae were detected in a Sentinel-2
image acquired south of Hispaniola Island, Caribbean Sea, on 8 May
2020 (Fig. 2a). In this image were selected 1809 pixels. The result of the
classification shown in Fig. 2b was: 89% classified as ‘floating vegetal’,
divided in class 1 (23% of total) and class 2 (66%), with no pixels dis­
playing a peak in band 5 (‘submerged vegetal’), and 11% of ‘probably
plastics’, mostly found in the ‘peak 6’ category (8% of total). Fig. 2c
shows the spectral signatures of the different categories obtained by
averaging the 50 brightest pixels in NIR (band 8). An example of
“sargassum” patch in band 8 is shown in Fig. 3a, classified in Fig. 3b.
The second dataset was extracted from a scene detected on 1st of
Fig. 2. (a) “Sargassum” patches detected south of Hispaniola, Greater Antilles, Caribbean Sea; (b) number of pixels per class; (c) spectral signatures of the
different categories.
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 168 (2021) 112457
August 2020 in North Adriatic, Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 4a). The area
offshore the coastal lagoon on the northern coast is frequently charac­
terized by the presence of marine litter, as verified by visual inspection
of the full Sentinel-2 dataset acquired in August 2020. Marine litter in
the area is mostly due to materials of vegetal origin, but the presence of
plastics is also documented (Campanale et al., 2019). In this case, the
classification of 1441 selected pixels shown in Fig. 4b produced: 75% of
‘floating vegetal’, divided in class 1 (26% of total) and class 2 (50%), 2%
of ‘submerged vegetal’ and 23% of ‘probably plastics’, mostly found in
the ‘peak 6’ category (16%). The spectral signatures are shown in
Fig. 4c. An example of detected patch in band 8 is shown in Fig. 5a,
classified in Fig. 5b.
3.2. Spectral signature of the filaments detected off Hawaii
The third dataset consists of the filaments detected offshore Hawaii,
shown in Fig. 6. The filaments have various length and orientation and
are located at less than 10 miles from the coast in the prevalent wind­
ward direction (NE). The most conspicuous filament (Fig. 6b) was about
20 km long from north to south and 80 m wide on average, with a
maximum width of 250 m. In this case, the classification of 7524
divided in class 1 (1% of total) and class 2 (20%), 15% of ‘submerged
vegetal’ and 64% of ‘probably plastics’. The spectral signatures per class
are shown in Fig. 7b and c. The peak in band 6 was found in about 57%
of total pixels (Fig. 7a), resulting in a saw-teeth profile in the red edge
(Fig. 7c, in red). All the filaments have similar distributions, indicating
that all were composed of the same mix of materials. Fig. 8 illustrates in
detail the wider section of the longest filament in the visible bands
(Fig. 8a), in NIR (Fig. 8b) and classified (Fig. 8c).
3.3. Comparison with previous methods
Biermann et al. (2020) attempted to classify different types of
floating materials as seaweed-seagrass, timber, pumice, sea foam and
plastic. The authors used two different datasets. The first consisted of
about 200 pixels selected over plastic litter washed after a flooding in
Durban, seaweed-sargassum detected around Barbados, timber or
woody debris, spume and seawater. The second dataset consisted of
about 100 pixels suspected to contain plastics found in different seas
(Ghana, Vietnam, Canada and Scotland). The authors trained a Bayesian
classification method with the first dataset and tested the method with
the second, with a positive outcome in 86% of cases. Focusing on NDVI
and FDI, the authors reported that (i) plastic was distinguishable from
other materials using NDVI, while FDI primarily depended on the
A.C. Ciappa Marine Pollution Bulletin 168 (2021) 112457

Fig. 3. (a) “Sargassum” patch of Caribbean Sea in band 8 and (b) classified pixels (20 m spatial resolution).

Fig. 4. (a) Patches of mixed materials of vegetal origin detected in North Adriatic, Mediterranean Sea; (b) number of pixels per class; (c) spectral signatures of the
different categories.

Fig. 5. (a) Mixed patch detected in North Adriatic in band 8 and (b) classified pixels (20 m spatial resolution).

amount of material composing any given pixel; (ii) that different ma­
terials (including plastic) show distinct clustering when FDI and NDVI
were examined together.
These criteria have been tested using the results of this study. Pixels
extracted from the Hawaiian filaments and classified as ‘floating vegetal
1’, ‘floating vegetal 2’ and ‘submerged vegetal’ have been merged in a
single class of ‘vegetal’, and pixels classified as ‘peak 6 - probably
plastics’ and ‘peak 7 - probably plastics’ have been merged in the single
class of ‘plastics’; then NDVI and FDI have been calculated. The results
are shown in box plots in Fig. 9a for an easy comparison with Fig. 2 in
Biermann et al. (2020). Both NDVI and FDI averages of ‘vegetal’ pixels
are higher than for ‘plastic’ pixels as in Biermann et al. (2020), but no
distinct clustering is evident and the two classes are not separable using
NDVI or FDI alone. Also, the two classes do not show distinct clustering
when FDI and NDVI are used together, as illustrated in Fig. 9b and c. All
of this seems to indicate distinct differences between results acquired
with the method described in this study and those produced by the
combined use of NDVI and FDI.
4. Discussion
The first aim of this study was to determine the nature of the detected

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A.C. Ciappa Marine Pollution Bulletin 168 (2021) 112457

Fig. 6. Filaments detected offshore Hawaii by Sentinel-2 tiles acquired on 14 October 2020; filaments (in yellow) are superimposed to the ‘true colors’ combination
(bands 4, 3, 2). (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 7. Classification of the filaments detected offshore Hawaii. (a) number of pixels per class; (b) spectral signature of floating and submerged materials of ‘vegetal’
origin; (c) spectral signature of presumed plastic classes.

Fig. 8. (a) Eastern filament detected offshore Hawaii in the visible bands, (b) detail in band 8 (NIR) and (c) classified pixels (20 m spatial resolution).

patches, but the information extracted from the 10 m bands in the visible
portion of the spectrum (bands 2, 3, 4) and NIR (band 8) are not suffi­
cient to discriminate the type of material. The reasons are that, in the
visible bands, Biermann et al. (2020) found plastic to be more reflective
than seaweed-sargassum and seawater, but used samples of marine litter
released after a flooding, and Kikaki et al. (2020) reported that plastics,
“sargassum” and seawater were almost equally reflective in oceanic
patches of the Caribbean Sea. These differences in the visible bands can
be useful but are not decisive. In NIR (band 8), where both seaweed and
“sargassum” are more reflective than plastics and the sea signal is almost
null, a pixel moderately high in band 8 can be partially filled by seawater
and seaweed or fully filled of plastics. Thus, the decision to focus on the
red edge bands was motivated by: (a) the likelihood that only dense
aggregates of plastics would be distinct (bright) in the visible bands of
Sentinel-2, and (b) that in the NIR band both plastic and seaweed can be
confused.
The plastic detection method described in this study consists of two
phases: (i) the identification of marine litter patches, where plastic

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A.C. Ciappa
Fig. 9. (a) Boxplots of NDVI and FDI of the filaments detected offshore Hawaii; Plots of (b) ‘vegetal’ and (c) ‘plastic’ pixels (b) in NDVI and FDI.
debris is possibly mixed with other materials; (ii) the discrimination of
the type of material within the detected patches.
Marine litter patches have been identified by selecting pixels 1.5
times brighter than the seawater in NIR (band 8), as plastic and many
materials of vegetal origin are characterized by high reflectance in NIR
(Maximenko et al., 2019; Biermann et al., 2020). The decision to use
band 8 rather than spectral indexes as PI or NDVI is justified by the
results reported in Themistocleous et al. (2020), in which several spec­
tral indexes were submitted to objective sensitivity analysis using an
artificial target of plastic bottles anchored in proximity to the beach. The
authors found that PI ranked better than NDVI, even though the NDVI
range (0–1) is twice the PI range (0.5–1), as in sea pixels NDVI ≈ 0 and
PI ≈ 0.5 (B4 ≈ B8) and over the target both indexes are close to 1 (B4 ≪
B8). The reason for this apparent inconsistency is the relevance of the
variability in the surrounding sea, as any target is detected in contrast
with its background (Themistocleous et al., 2020). NDVI and PI vari­
ability is due to the sediment and chlorophyll content, which increases
reflectance in band 4 (Hafeez et al., 2018). Still, PI is less sensitive than
NDVI to changes of band 4. In short, in sensitive analysis PI ranked
better than NDVI because it is easier to detect a target in a flat sea (in PI)
than in a rough sea (in NDVI). These considerations suggest that the use
of these indexes is not ideal in target detection, as both, though to a
varying degree, are affected by the local distribution of chlorophyll and
sediments, and target detection could produce unbalanced results from
one area to the next. Therefore, target detection was performed using
band 8. Nevertheless, for monitoring to become routinary, sophisticated
methods would be needed, as the detection process is hindered by cloud
shadows, whitecaps, ships and wakes.
The method proposed here for the discrimination of plastics consists
of the elimination of alternatives to plastics on the basis of the red edge
of known materials. The method applies the rule that “other floating
materials such as marine debris or garbage or emulsified oil can lead to
enhanced reflectance in all NIR bands, but not cause red edge reflec­
tance” (Hu et al., 2015). The red edge of materials of vegetal origin is
largely documented (Gower et al., 1999, 2006; Dierssen et al., 2015; Hu
et al., 2015) and Gower et al. (1999) reported that the peak between 700
and 710 nm (band 5 of Sentinel-2) is typical of submerged plants or
floating plankton. Plastic litter behaviour in the red edge bands of
Sentinel-2 is not largely documented. Biermann et al. (2020) do not
report specific peaks in band 6 or 7 for plastics, but neither show any
spectral signature close to what extracted from the Hawaiian filaments.
Chaotic signature of plastics in the red edge is reported in Topouzelis
et al. (2020) for an artificial target, and a similar saw-teeth spectral
signature due to the peak in band 6 (Fig. 7c) is shown in Themistocleous
et al. (2020) from spectro-radiometer measurements of the artificial
plastic target in the sea.
The classification method was tested on three datasets of marine
litter. In the first two, the percentage of material of vegetal origin
(floating and submerged) was 89% and 77%, respectively, which is
consistent with “sargassum” patches and marine litter mostly of vegetal
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Marine Pollution Bulletin 168 (2021) 112457
origin, while in the third dataset, i.e. the Hawaiian filaments, the per­
centage was only 36%. In the Hawaiian filaments, 64% of the material
appeared to be of not vegetable origin, and was largely characterized by
a peak in band 6 (57% of total).
Several considerations support the conclusion that most of the Ha­
waiian filaments consist of plastics. First, the bright signature in the
visible bands shown in Fig. 8a for the eastern filaments and in Fig. 10 for
the western ones. Following Biermann et al. (2020), this could be an
indication of dense aggregation of plastics. Second, the filaments cannot
be locally generated (Carson et al., 2013; Blickley et al., 2016; Brignac
et al., 2019), as otherwise they would be more frequent. Of 44 Sentinel-2
scenes acquired in the same area over a period of six months (June to
December 2020), six were cloudy and only in one (December) thin fil­
aments were visible. The non-local origin makes it less likely they would
be vegetal materials coming from the island. Finally, the filaments, only
occasionally detected offshore, could be related to the large amounts of
plastic periodically flooding Hawaiian beaches, which seem to stem
from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (Kubota, 1994; Brandon et al.,
2016; Moy et al., 2018; Lebreton et al., 2018; Egger et al., 2020).
5. Conclusions
The marine litter possibly consist of macroalgae (e.g. “sargassum”);
cyanobacteria, typically widespread in many ocean areas; slicks and
foam caused by organic processes; seagrasses, wood and terrestrial
plants; or plastic. In oceanic patches these materials are aggregated in
different percentages, therefore it is crucial to distinguish them to detect
plastics.
The work done in this study is mainly driven by the analysis of the
data acquired by Sentinel-2 on “sargassum” patches in the Caribbean
Sea, mixed patches with abundance of vegetal materials in North Adri­
atic and unknown filaments detected around Hawaii. Their comparison
emphasized differences in the red edge, thus providing the opportunity
for a tentative classification of filaments detected offshore Hawaii. The
decision to focus on the red edge bands was motivated by the consid­
erations that the information coming from the visible bands and NIR of
Sentinel-2 is not sufficient to discriminate plastic.
The suggested method of classification of plastic litter is based on the
exclusion of materials of vegetal origin and submerged seaweed using
the red edge bands of Sentinel-2. More specifically, the method allows
excluding as materials of vegetal origin those with increasing values in
bands 5, 6, and 7, and as submerged seaweed those with a peak in band
5. Remaining pixels with a peak in band 6 or in band 7 are most likely to
consist of plastic.
With this method, 89% of “sargassum” patches (total 1801 pixels),
77% of mixed vegetal patches (1441) and only 36% of the filaments
offshore Hawaii (7524) were identified as of vegetal origin. In all like­
lihood, the filaments detected offshore Hawaii mainly consist of plastics.
The results of this classification agree only in part with previous pro­
posed methods.
A.C. Ciappa
Fig. 10. Western filaments detected offshore Hawaii in the visible bands (bands 4, 3, 2).
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Achille Carlo Ciappa: data analysis and Software, Writing- Original
draft preparation; Writing- Reviewing and Editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks the Editor and three anonymous reviewers, whose
comments helped to improve the manuscript, and Elena Cantoni for
English editing.
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