Abstract
Urban waste impacts human and environmental health, and waste management has become one of the major challenges of humanity. Concurrently with new directives due to manage this human by-product, illegal dumping has become one of the most lucrative activities of organized crime. Beyond economic fraud, illegal waste disposal strongly enhances uncontrolled dissemination of human pathogens, pollutants and invasive species. Here, we demonstrate the potential of novel real-time GPS tracking of scavenging species to detect environmental crime. Specifically, we were able to detect illegal activities at an officially closed dump, which was visited recurrently by 5 of 19 GPS-tracked yellow-legged gulls (Larus michahellis). In comparison with conventional land-based surveys, GPS tracking allows a much wider and cost-efficient spatiotemporal coverage, even of the most hazardous sites, while GPS data accessibility through the internet enables rapid intervention. Our results suggest that multi-species guilds of feathered detectives equipped with GPS and cameras could help fight illegal dumping at continental scales. We encourage further experimental studies, to infer waste detection thresholds in gulls and other scavenging species exploiting human waste dumps.
Highlights
The world’s human population produces > 3 million tonnes of solid waste per day, more than all other anthropogenic emissions, including greenhouse gases [1,2]
Regarding the habitat used during foraging activities, we found that tracked gulls mainly exploited the marine environment (44.4% of total GPS positions), followed by estuaries (21.6%), freshwater habitats (10.7%), terrestrial habitats (16.0%), saltpans (6.2%) and waste dumps (1.1%) (Fig 1A)
Our data demonstrate that scavenging gulls equipped with real-time GPS recorders can provide accurate and immediate information about the existence and location of illegal urban waste dumps
Summary
The world’s human population produces > 3 million tonnes of solid waste per day, more than all other anthropogenic emissions, including greenhouse gases [1,2]. Trafficking of human waste has recently become one of the most lucrative activities of organized crime [3] This is famously the case in southern Italy, where the mafia colludes with local institutions to control waste markets, with consequences for the environment and people’s health [5,6]. This type of environmental crime has been recently reported in other European countries such as Spain, Greece, France, Romania, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom, based on infringement proceedings opened by the Court of Justice of the European Union (http:// europa.eu/about-eu/institutions-bodies/court-justice/index_en.htm), by further official reports, and by the media. We thereby show how GPS-tracked gulls pinpoint illegal waste dump activity in southern Spain, a region where this activity is a standing practice [10]
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