A major mission of the Protected Resources Division is to monitor the status of protected species in U.S. waters or waters where the U.S. has a vested interest. Most of this monitoring is conducted aboard NOAA research vessels. A geographic visualization of this research activity is presented below for ship-based surveys from 1986 to 2008 (information about cruises conducted prior to 1986 is not displayed here at this time).
There are two options to interactively explore geographic-based information about our past research work. The first option uses the embedded web application below. You must have the Google Earth browser plug-in installed for your web browser. (This application has been tested with Internet Explorer (versions 7 and 8) and Firefox (version 3.5.7). There is a bug with Google Chrome (versions 3 and 4) which hopefully will be resolved by Google in the near future.) The second option uses the Google Earth 
desktop client. The link to the KMZ file that will open Google Earth is shown below. This content is best viewed with a broadband/high-speed connection and a newer computer. Please see the Google Earth site for details about computer requirements.