Jessica Knaggs

• BSc (Hons) Geography
• The development and application of a new tool for measuring wood debris and macro-plastic fluxes in river channels.

Developing a new tool for allowing the quantification of fluxes of woody debris and macro-plastics on the surface of river channels in the UK, France and Chile. Datasets have been collected at 15-minute intervals over the past 12 months. Through analysing these datasets, it was possible to determine the river channels with the highest quantity of macro-plastics and woody debris. For this tool to be developed, objects from videos were manually identified and labelled on a computer as plastic, wood or leaves and used to create an algorithm that recognises these items in other videos. The most common macro-plastic items identified were traffic cones and footballs. This technique could be utilised in the future as part of flood management. Further labelling will have to be carried out in order to make the algorithm more accurate. Obtaining knowledge on transportation of macro-plastics in rivers could inform future studies on this topic.

Funding source: Newcastle University

Project supervisor: Dr Matthew Perks