Monitoring of marine benthic communities - Improvement of analytical technique based on image analysis

Environmental monitoring based on image-analysis and automatic data retrieval and handling is believed to become important tools in the assessment of human activities and their effects on marine ecosystems. The goal of this project is to improve and refin e methods and techniques used in monitoring of benthic biota. An important aim is to develop rapid, useful and effective techniques based on image analysis of underwater photo- and video-recordings which can be applied in the ecological monitoring of nort hern and arctic marine ecosystems. Developed methods and techniques will be applied in the existsing photographic material from two long term time series (> 20 yrs; Kongsfjorden at Svalbard; Balsfjord in Troms), and on photographs and ROV based video recordings from the Jan Mayen area coll ected in relation to a study of colonization and succession of new lava-areas created in 1970. Additional and refined data will be collected from the field with ROV using new scaling techniques in order to obtain more reliable quantitative video-data. The need for a new field data collected with ROV is found necessary due to insufficiencies recorded during the tentative treatment of the available video-recordings collected with the ROV "Aglantha".