Exploring Britain's Hidden World: A natural history of seabed habitats

Keith Hiscock is an ecologist who has been studying marine habitats and species for more than fifty years. A fortuitous combination of interests in marine biology, diving and photography and a great deal of good luck being in the right place at the right time has provided him with the opportunity to become a leading marine ecologist and conservation scientist in Britain. His early interest in seashore life and especially cold-water corals progressed through a degree in Zoology with Botany and then a PhD studying The Influence of Water Movement on the Ecology of Sublittoral Rocky Areas. After a short period monitoring rocky shores around Anglesey, he was appointed as Deputy Director of the Field Studies Council Oil Pollution Research Unit at Orielton Field Centre in Pembrokeshire in 1975. From there, he, with many others, developed the methods and equipment that would be used to describe, catalogue and classify seabed habitats and their associated communities (now known as `biotopes') around Britain through a series of studies commissioned by the then Nature Conservancy Council (NCC). When the NCC determined that a Marine Nature Conservation Review of Great Britain (MNCR) was needed, he was appointed to head that team in 1987. In 1998, the Review was `finished', although far from complete. By now employed by English Nature, he had seen the need to bring together marine biological information and make it more useful for environmental protection and management, including through a new medium called `The Internet'. That vision was achieved with the Marine Biological Association (MBA) and is the Marine Life information Network (MarLIN) and its `spin-outs': the Data Archive for Marine Species and Habitats and much of the education programme at the MBA. Having retired in 2007, he has continued to contribute to work at the MBA and is an Associate Fellow there as well as pursuing those passions for marine biology, diving and photography in his own time.