Abandoned, lost or discarded fishing gear is a serious problem for the health of our oceans. Although the exact volume of lost gear is not known, it is estimated that around 800,000 tons of commercial fishing gear disappears into the ocean each year!

This app developed in partnership with the Global Ghost Gear Initiative allows you to report details and location of lost gear of any kind that you might come across.

A lot of this gear ends up on the shore line or sea bed: and that's where you can use this app to report:

1) Fishing gear location
2) Your activities when you found it
3) Details about the gear
4) Images of the gear
5) Any wildlife that may be caught in the gear.

This vital information is passed to local conservation groups that can recover the gear, but beyond this: your participation in locating and describing this gear helps a global effort to study and improve our understanding of this problem. This allows us to build plans to combat it!

So help us to improve our ocean health - you'll be joining organizations based all over the world in combating this hard-to-see, but incredibly destructive problem we are facing.

Keywords: ghost gear, fishing, environmentalism, ecology, green, marine plastics, reporting.