Central to this are impacts on food webs. Besides direct impacts on biodiversity, land uses can alter the functioning and structure of ecosystems. Human land use is of growing concern for island ecosystems. Debris accumulation hotspots overlapped with sea turtle nesting habitat, guiding future beach clean-up prioritisation. Standardisation of surveys using the open-source MDT App is recommended. AMD varied within island zones: most debris observed on oceanside beaches (oceanside vs lagoon, W = 365, p < 0.001 ocean vs island tip, W = 107, p = 0.034). Significant latitudinal variation in vegetation AMD occurred (8-fold greater in southern atolls, p = 0.006). The density of plastic debris in littoral vegetation (MDT data: 1995 bottles, 3328 fragments per 100 m²) was 10-fold greater than in open beach (photoquadrat data: 184 bottles, 106 fragments per 100 m²). Over 60 % of AMD in both beach zones was composed of plastics, especially bottles and fragments (mean = 44.9 %, 27.2 %, range = 16.5–73.2 %, 4.8–55.9 % respectively in vegetation mean = 28.7 %, 31.5 %, range = 17.7–40.7 %, 11.6–60.0 % respectively in open beach). AMD on 14 island beaches in five atolls were surveyed in 2019 using two techniques: Marine Debris Tracker (MDT) along littoral vegetation and photoquadrats in open beach. We report Anthropogenic Marine Debris (AMD) in Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, globally amongst the most isolated island groups.
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