Friendly Floatee River Drifters

Friendly Floatee takes its name from a famous accident. In 1992, a container of 28,800 plastic bath toys, known as Friendly Floatees, fell into the North Pacific. Oceanographers Curtis Ebbesmeyer and James Ingraham tracked where the toys washed up and used the finds to improve their models of ocean currents.

Friendly Floatee applies the same idea to rivers, using drifters you can track live and recover.

Ita Seoul publishes the component blueprints, the bill of materials (a full parts list), data specifications and the forms you need to coordinate with local authorities under an open licence.

Each observation feeds a shared, standardised data model, so data from your river lines up with data from other rivers. Alongside the bottleneck map, the team analyses “residence time”: how long the drifters stay in each section.

The project supports three UN Sustainable Development Goals: Clean Water and Sanitation (6), Sustainable Cities and Communities (11) and Life Below Water (14).

Visit the Friendly Floatee website to see the drifters in action: https://floatee.caresea.kr/