Nationwide Marine Debris Survey
Implemented NOAA’s national marine debris sampling design through safe, consistent shoreline field operations and defensible data collection across diverse U.S. coastal regions.
Capabilities
Nationwide Field Operations • Program Management & Logistics • Data Quality & Lifecycle Management • Environmental & Regulatory Compliance
Mission Context
Marine debris affects coastal ecosystems, navigation, fisheries, and tourism. Addressing it at scale requires consistent, defensible data that can be compared across regions and used to guide prevention and mitigation. The NOAA Marine Debris Program’s MDMAP Nationwide Survey is designed to establish a statistically representative baseline of marine debris across the United States, spanning highly diverse coastal environments across the continental U.S., Great Lakes, Alaska, Hawai‘i, and other Pacific Islands, as well as the Caribbean.
Objective
Execute NOAA’s spatially balanced sampling design and shoreline data-collection methodology at a national scale by delivering safe, repeatable, and scientifically consistent field operations that produce regionally representative baseline estimates of marine debris across U.S. shorelines.
@Orchard Solution
Selected by the NOAA Marine Debris Program, @Orchard serves as the prime contractor responsible for translating a rigorous scientific framework into a coordinated national implementation model. This work requires more than conducting shoreline surveys—it demands an integrated operational system capable of delivering consistent outcomes across widely varying regional conditions, access constraints, permitting environments, and logistical realities.
To meet that challenge, @Orchard designed and managed a program framework that aligns planning, safety, training, logistics, and quality assurance into a single nationwide delivery model. To support consistent execution across distributed teams and locations, @Orchard implemented a required train-the-trainer approach that reinforced adherence to NOAA’s survey methodology while enabling scalable delivery. In parallel, @Orchard established structured quality controls to preserve scientific integrity at scale—supporting standardized collection procedures, documenting non-response conditions, and ensuring data reliability and comparability across regions.
Impact
This effort establishes a statistically defensible national baseline of marine debris across U.S. shorelines—creating a foundational dataset that supports NOAA’s ability to understand the scope of the problem, compare conditions across regions, and inform evidence-based decision-making. The observations produced under this survey are integrated into NOAA’s data systems and made available to the public, expanding access to a nationally consistent environmental resource that supports researchers, coastal managers, policymakers, and communities. By solving the real-world operational complexity of nationwide environmental monitoring—spanning diverse geographies, regulatory contexts, and field conditions—@Orchard enables NOAA to convert scientific design into implementation at scale, with data that can be trusted, applied, and communicated to drive meaningful public benefit.
