Airborne remote-sensed hyperspectral in-situ radiometry data and hyperspectral imagery collected by the NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility (FSF) Headwall Co-aligned VNIR and SWIR imager (450-2500 nm) with LiDAR instruments mounted on a drone platform. These hyperspectral data collected over a sandy and rocky shore have associated uncertainty estimations that will be used to develop of radiometric proxies for plastics detection and assess future mission requirements. This dataset was collected on 22nd July 2021 from Oban airport's shore using a range of different plastic targets

Airborne remote-sensed hyperspectral in-situ radiometry data and hyperspectral imagery collected by the NERC Field Spectroscopy Facility (FSF) Headwall Co-aligned VNIR and SWIR imager (450-2500 nm) with LiDAR instruments mounted on a drone platform. These hyperspectral data collected over a sandy and rocky shore have associated uncertainty estimations that will be used to develop of radiometric proxies for plastics detection and assess future mission requirements. This dataset was collected on 29th September 2020 at Tyninghame beach, East Lothian, Scotland using a range of different plastic targets.

This dataset contains raw beaching data computed by marine debris simulations (run using OceanParcels) for a range of physical scenarios (surface currents from GLORYS12V1 (https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2021.698876), Stokes drift from WAVERYS (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10236-020-01433-w), and surface winds from ERA5 (https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3803)), as described in the accompanying manuscript. Through postprocessing, debris ‘connectivity’ matrices can be computed, providing predictions for the main terrestrial and marine source regions of plastic debris accumulating at remote islands in the western Indian Ocean. These simulations include beaching and sinking processes, and a set of example matrices is provided here (https://doi.org/10.5287/bodleian:DEdqwXZQw). However, these matrices can be recomputed for different sinking and beaching rates using the scripts archived here (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7351695), or see here (https://github.com/nvogtvincent/WIO_Marine_Debris/) for the live version with documentation. These predictions will be useful for environmental practitioners in the western Indian Ocean to assess source regions for marine debris accumulating at islands of interest, and when this debris is likely to beach. The data were produced as part of the Marine Dispersal and Retention in the Western Indian Ocean project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) grant NE/S007474/1. See linked online references on this record for cited items given above.