Bruce Barker

Bruce has been working with CSIRO for over 20 years. He has been involved in marine sciences for 26 years. Seagoing has been part of his working life for the whole of this time.

During the past 10 years Bruce has been involved in habitat and ecosystem studies.

Using video technology to view the seafloor, and its communities, has been one of his tasks throughout this period. During that time underwater observing systems have been greatly developed and improved. Today Bruce is able to collect vastly superior imagery than 5-10 years ago.

While advancing technology has largely contributed to this but it is still necessary to design new platforms and systems to enable the collection of high quality footage, at depths ranging from 50 to 2000 meters.

"The incorporation of a high-resolution digital stills camera has been an exciting advent in recent times," says Bruce. "The high-quality images have added so much to our knowledge of the communities. We are able to zoom
into the images and identify many more of the individuals making up benthic communities.

"This has value added to our video footage and enabled a greater level of interpretation." Said Bruce. "The still images have also been great for posters, presentations and publications. People get quite excited about what we do. For me it is both exciting and satisfying to be part of collecting this imagery. It is a team effort we are generally the first to set eyes upon these deepwater habitats."

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Updated: 29/03/07