The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Sanctuary (NMS) Program has established an innovative educational and technological framework to bring the excitement of the nation’s underwater ecosystems to the American public by linking telepresence activities with system-wide oceanographic monitoring programs. This initiative will revolutionize oceanographic information dissemination by integrating live video camera feeds with data streams as diverse as observations collected by citizen-scientists, satellite records, and measurements collected by monitoring stations in the marine sanctuaries. Integration is achieved through distributed data systems and protocols that enable unified internet access to information collected at multiple sites through multiple observing systems.

Martin, M. 2003. Education vignette: Connecting the NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries through telepresence. Oceanography 16(4):60, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2003.13.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.