IT Initiatives

Geographic Information System (GIS)
Enterprise GIS will provide software applications the ability to overlay map longitude/latitude data with geographical map information providing users a geo-referenced view of their information. Geo-referenced views of fisheries, protected species, and environmental data will enhance fishery management, policy making and protected species research. With an agency-wide national focus, GIS will interface with other data collections available in agency database applications. Agency-wide needs assessment and initial project planning and staging were complete in FY2002. Essential Fish Habitat application and Salmon Data Management are currently piloting GIS layering.

Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program (MMHSRP)
The NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources (PR) is the coordinating office for program and activities of the Marine Mammal Health and Stranding Response Program Database (MMHSRP Database). MMHSRP provides twenty years of stranding events information, in an electronic standardized format, required for conservation and management decisions. MMHSRP enforces standardized data collection and management within a centralized national marine mammal database, which includes content from existing regional databases. Centralized data management will allow the agency to compare data between regions, to efficiently query and analyze stranding data for effective conservation management, and to quickly respond to constituency information requests. MMHSRP was implemented in FY2002 providing regional stranding coordinators Intranet access to stranding information.

Protected Resources Information and Status Management (PRISM/PCTS)
PRISM tracks the status of consultations conducted by the NOAA Fisheries under section 7 of the Endangered Species Act; as well as, information on consultations for Essential Fish Habitat under the Magnuson-Stevens Act. PRISM consists of a NOAA Fisheries Intranet web site, which provides access to and query of repositories, and password-protected data entry. A portion of the PRISM data is published to the Public Consultation Tracking System (PCTS) public web site for querying.

Public Consultation Tracking System (PCTS)
Upon request from the Secretary of Commerce, in response to requests from the Pacific Northwest Corp or Engineers, PCTS was created to provide secured, online, password-protected access to those requesting status updates on Federal Agency consultation actions conducted by NOAA Fisheries. Integration with the Protected Resources Information and Status Management (PRISM) system was completed resulting in a single centralized database with portions of data available through the PCTS web site. Nine additional regional agencies were made available in FY2002 with expanded ad hoc query capabilities and downloadable results sets.

NOAA Fisheries Internet Website
This website is the NOAA Fisheries public web presence, consisting of approximately 30 portal pages guiding users to information available at agency sponsored web sites. Providing users valuable information, links and transactional capabilities on www.nmfs.noaa.gov reduces administrative burden and improves customer satisfaction. An initial website face-lift was completed to include easier subject oriented navigation and more intuitive look and feel.