FY18 Deep-Sea Exploration, Characterization, and Education in National Marine Sanctuaries Using Telepresence

FY18 Deep-Sea Exploration, Characterization, and Education in National Marine Sanctuaries funding opportunity is being offered to explore and document the deep-sea oceanography, marine habitats, cultural sites, and living and non-living resources in and around national marine sanctuaries to better understand their biology, ecology, geology, and cultural resources. The research should use deep-sea technology and telepresence communication systems to create high-end 4K imagery, collect critical data and information, and create derived products with that data, including maps of deep-water regions in the National Marine Sanctuary System. In addition, the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries (ONMS) strives to engage broad audiences to enhance America’s environmental literacy through the excitement of ocean discovery. This deep-sea research should utilize telepresence technology from the research platform to beam high resolution images and video to distributed land-based locations to engaged distributed science parties, as well as to locations accessible to the general public and formal and informal educators and their associated facilities. ONMS regularly forms such collaborations to reach out to the public in innovative ways to improve the literacy of learners with respect to ocean issues.

Miscellaneous

• Other