Robot cameras monitor deep sea ecosystems
Monday, January 12, 2015 - 16:31
in Earth & Climate
Advanced photographic tools in an unmanned Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) have been used to make major advancements in estimating deep-sea ecosystem diversity at ‘landscape’ scales, researchers report. By using a camera on the Autosub6000 AUV to take a continuous stream of high resolution photographs of life on the sea floor, this new method revealed a tenfold increase in the precision of deep sea ecosystem diversity estimates relative to the use of scientific trawling.