[1] Initially supported by funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the project was successful in generating many times that initial investment in additional support and substantially increased the baselines of knowledge in often underexplored ocean realms, as well as engaging over 2,700 different researchers for the first time in a global collaborative community united in a common goal, and has been described as "one of the largest scientific collaborations ever conducted".

[6] Results from these workshops, plus associated invited contributions, formed the basis of a special issue of Oceanography magazine in 1999;[7] later that year, a workshop in Washington, D.C. addressed the formation of an Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) which would serve to collate existing knowledge about the distribution of organisms in the ocean and form the information management component of the Census.

[8] The Census began in a formal sense with the announcement in May 2000 of eight grants totaling about 4 million US$ to create OBIS, as reported in Science magazine, 2 June.

[9][10] Meanwhile, an International Scientific Steering Committee was formed in 1999, which by 2001 envisaged "about half a dozen pilot [field] programs" for the period 2002-2004 which, along with OBIS and another project called "History of Marine Animal Populations" (HMAP), would provide the initial activities of the Census, to be followed by an additional series of field programs in 2005-2007, culminating in an analysis and integration phase in 2008-2010.

This was not leadership that sought out problems to solve – it identified an issue that could not be addressed through conventional national funding mechanisms and could only be approached through a large-scale collaborative endeavour.

Towards the end of the project, additional teams were created for education and outreach, and mapping and vizualization products, while a "synthesis" group coordinated the final outcomes (publications, etc.).

During its lifespan, the Census involved some 2,700 scientists from more 80 countries who spent 9,000 days at sea participating in more than 540 census-badged expeditions,[15] as well as uncounted nearshore sampling events.

From this we may be able to derive estimates of population diversity, distribution and abundance for selected groups of organisms or regions and a future compilation of such data will show how far our knowledge has moved from 2010...