Plastic bags, rope and wooden flotsam appear to be trapped up front and while smaller objects penetrate deeper into the mangrove forest, being driven in by wind and tidal forces. Submerged beach debris collected in two 4-m wide × 25-m long transects parallel to the shore at 2–3 m depth in seagrass beds in front of the Lac public beach at Sorobon, amounted to 26 (0.5 kg) and 71 (3.6 kg) pieces of man-made litter. The surficial debris concentrations were respectively 0.26 (0.005 kg) m−2 and 0.71 (0.036 kg) items m−2. The nature of the litter collected was fully recreational,

and plastic beverage cups that are easily blown into the water, comprised 71% of all items. The documented densities are comparable to those described for unmanaged public beaches in nearby Curaçao (Nagelkerken et al., 2001, selleckchem Mar. Poll Bull. 42:786–789). Marine litter contamination is a wide-spread problem and

considered to be one of the most serious threats to sustainable use of the region’s marine and coastal resources. Mangrove litter and shallow submerged litter contamination figure significantly in Bonaire and we have made practical recommendations to help address these problems in a separate report to government. In presenting this synopsis here, we aim to draw scientific attention to these largely neglected facets of the litter problem and hope to see further studies to assess the extent of these problems in the Wider Caribbean. “
“As often shown in these pages, marine management is extremely complex in that it has to

accommodate multi-sectors, multi-users, multi-uses, multi-agencies and AZD6244 cell line so on (Fig. 1). It has to accommodate ‘moving-baselines’, D-malate dehydrogenase the judging of whether a marine area has changed due to small-scale, local human activities against a background of underlying change, for example due to climate change. It also has to accommodate large spatial scales and what we might call ‘unbounded-boundaries’, for example to manage an area in the temperate latitudes while considering the ecology of some of its organisms (such as birds and marine mammals) in the polar regions. As mentioned before (Elliott, 2011), there is only one big idea in marine management, including coasts and estuaries – that we have to protect and maintain the natural ecological characteristics and processes and conservation features while at the same time deliver the ecosystem services and benefits required by society. This can be regarded as The Ecosystem Approach. Previous papers (see references below), suggested that to achieve this for successful and sustainable marine management requires an interlinked set of tenets. This note explains and expands those tenets. The overarching accepted framework required to achieve the Ecosystem Approach has been described as the ‘three-legged stool’ or the ‘three pillars of sustainability’, for example for ecology, economy and society.