Piers Dunstan
Spatial Data Management

Piers Dunstan joined CSIRO in 2003. Prior to that he looked at the environmental effects of fishing and environmental flows into estuaries. This was at the Tasmanian Aquaculture and Fisheries Institute which is part of the University of Tasmania.

He joined CSIRO's Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research as an ecological modeller and the Wealth from Oceans
Voyage of Discovery is his first scientific sea voyage.

Piers entered science because he had a facination with the world and a desire to understand it.

"I started out working in coral reefs looking at coral spawning. Some of the patterns I studied made me want to do a PhD in what controlled community dynamics. My work evolved and I ended up studying invasions into marine ecosystems.

I joined CSIRO to study invasions by feral sea stars and how best to manage human activities to reduce their spread."

Piers is finding this voyage interesting, particularly seeing how the different techniques are brought together. He's assisted with water sampling to calibrate CTD samples (conductivity, temperature and depth), deploying sediment grabs and multibeam swath mapping. Piers didn't expect the periods of down time between sampling and he's been using that time to finish off some other work.

"The idea behind joining this voyage was to get an impression of how different types of data are collected and what's collected. This will make it easier for me to analyse and identify biogeographic patterns along the West Australian coast."

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Updated: 29/03/07