In July 2025, we returned to Skye for our third field season. With two years of experience and data collection behind us, 2025’s trip took a more solutions focus. We used our own experiences of beach litter surveying from 2023 and 2024, as well as conversations we have had with beach cleaners and surveyors across Scotland’s west coast, to test some alternative approaches to beach litter surveying ahead of our 2025-2026 project titled CALMER: Coastal Anthropogenic Litter Monitoring with Ecological Citizen Researchers.
CALMER will work with community groups to evaluate the suitability of some of the methods that we tested in Summer 2025. We also used our time this year to learn more about the diversity of marine litter work that takes place on Scotland’s west coast all year. We were delighted to be invited to the Sleat Nature Group’s Life’s a Beach event at An Crubh, where we had three stalls about our work. We attended community beach cleans at Ostaig and Camasunary as well.
We also made the most of having the entire team together to advance the first manuscript of our work, which we will be submitting soon.
As always, we were very grateful for the warm reception we received and the local support for the work we are doing. We can’t wait to come back in July 2026.