Meet the Scientist: Examining Scotland's marine habitats through a lens

Examining Scotland's marine habitats through a camera lens: uncertainty and change

For over thirty years Dr. Graham Saunders has been studying and developing ways to protect Scotland’s underwater world, both as an academic engaged in scientific study and as a past Scottish Natural Heritage (now NatureScot) Monitoring Officer and Policy Manager. A self-acknowledged compulsive underwater photographer, despite his initial disastrous childhood snorkelling experiment involving a plastic bag and a “borrowed” family Kodak Brownie camera, Graham rarely enters the water without something to visually capture the amazing diversity of life that thrive in Scotland’s seas.

At first, his pictures were the results of hurried efforts to grab little more that snapshots using some very limited underwater time at the end of a survey or scientific expedition. Increasingly, however, the value of the images in stimulating wider interest in the marine environment was recognised and now he is frequently required to be the “official” photographer and his images are widely used to illustrate scientific reports, news articles, web sites, campaign posters, and educational awareness displays. Inevitably, he has accumulated a huge and varied collection of images that constitute a record of often rarely seen and sometimes highly vulnerable underwater habitats and species.

In this talk Graham uses some of his images to reflect on his past and current work on studying and conserving Scottish marine habitats and species and to highlight some of the difficulties we are currently experiencing when trying to determine whether human activities are the cause of change in the marine environment.