A Low-Cost Entangling Drifter for Sargassum Tracking: Design and Experimental Evaluation

Since 2011, Sargassum, a free-floating macroalgae, has been causing significant ecological and economic damage to coastal regions in the Northern Equatorial Atlantic due to its voluminous blooms. To better understand the fate and effects of Sargassum, approaches are needed to track its transport. Here we developed a low-cost drifter, designed to entangle with Sargassum, to aid in its tracking providing in situ movement data to ground-truth models and supplementing gaps in satellite imaging. The results of 27 drifter designs and five days of field trials are presented. The successful entanglement and tracking with the Sargassum demonstrated here can guide future studies to further our understanding of the movement of Sargassum in the great Atlantic Sargassum belt (GASB).