The Census has evolved a strategy of 14 field projects to touch the major habitats and groups of species in the global ocean. Eleven field projects address habitats, such as seamounts or the Arctic Ocean. Three field projects look globally at animals that either traverse the seas or appear globally distributed: the top predators such as tuna and the plankton and the microbes. The projects employ a mix of technologies. These include acoustics or sound, optics or cameras, tags placed on individual animals that store or report data, and genetics, as well as some actual capture of animals.

The Census of Marine Life provides a much clearer picture of what lives below the surface around the globe. Several reasons make such a report timely, indeed urgent. Better information is needed to fashion the management that will sustain fisheries, conserve diversity, reverse losses of habitat, reduce impacts of pollution, and respond to global climate change. Hence, there are biological, economic, philosophical and political reasons to push for greater exploration and understanding of the ocean and its inhabitants. Indeed, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity requires signatories to collect information on living resources, but, as yet, no nation has a complete baseline of such information. The Census of Marine Life's global network of researchers will help to fill this knowledge gap, providing critical information to help guide decisions on how to manage global marine resources for the future. [This information was copied from http://www.coml.org/about, then edited and shortened.]

The Image Gallery from the Census provides close-up photography of species, many never before seen. In addition, the maps and visualizations produced at Duke University’s Marine Geospatial Ecology Lab provide striking visual overviews of the Census projects and activities as a whole.