Beach Guardian

The Project

Coastal debris accumulation reflects a structural mismatch between static governance systems and dynamic spatiotemporal ecological processes. Conventional cleanup strategies rely on fixed infrastructure placement and periodic scheduling, often resulting in inefficient resource allocation and delayed hotspot response. This study evaluates whether integrating real-time citizen debris reports with environmental forcing variables within a spatiotemporal forecasting framework can improve coastal resource allocation efficiency relative to static deployment models. Beach Guardian transforms crowdsourced observations into a continuously updated geospatial dataset, enabling adaptive hotspot prioritization and dynamic resource deployment. Pilot validation demonstrated 92.55% classification accuracy in debris detection and measurable improvement in cleanup efficiency (E = Debris Removed / Volunteer Hours) compared to uniform static allocation benchmarks. Hotspot ranking stability was maintained under dynamic environmental variability. These findings support the feasibility of a scalable, low cost decision support architecture for adaptive coastal governance and proactive environmental management.

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