Walk into any NOAA Fisheries office or open up any publication and you're bound to see a map. Because where animals, habitat, and people are, where they move and where and how they interact are the keys to carrying out our mission of conserving, protecting, and managing the Nation's living marine resources.
Because we need to know so much about location, maps and an understanding of the spatial relationships in marine-coastal ecosystems are fundamental to our work. A powerful tool for managing and modeling this complexity is the geographic information system (GIS).
GIS is used throughout NOAA Fisheries in every regional office, science center and lab and across every program. For details on featured GIS projects, click on one of the application area links below:
Habitat Protection, Conservation and Restoration
Stock Assessment
Fishery Management
Protected Resource Management
Socioeconomic Analysis
Ecosystem Dynamics
