GIS-Based Visualizations for the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary

Tiffany Vance
NMFS/Alaska Fisheries Science Center

The Cordell Bank Marine Sanctuary is a 526-square mile sanctuary located 50 miles northwest of San Francisco. As a part of a review of management plans for the Sanctuary, an extensive GIS has been created. We have created a 3D virtual world with these datasets to improve the ability of Sanctuary managers, scientists and the general public to understand the patterns and processes occurring at the Sanctuary. The goal of this project is to enable users to visualize the Sanctuary as a 3D entity rather than as a series of 2-dimensional maps.

The VRML content is navigated through an HTML page with an embedded VRML object and linked Java applet. The VRML object and Java applet communicate with one another through the External Authoring Interface (EAI). This allows the user to select different data representations (isosurfaces, color-coded contour slices, vector fields, etc) for each data set.

Future developments will include the use of Java3D to provide enhanced interactivity. Since Java3D is platform independent, a VisAD-based Cordell Bank application would run on everything from PC desktops and laptops to SGI and Sun workstations to Linux superclusters to full-featured immersive visualization systems like the ImmersaDesk, CAVE, and GeoWall.