A Little Introduction
Hi Everyone!
My name is Nelene Silva, and I’m in my final year at Dalhousie University completing an Honours degree in Marine Biology, along with a minor in Environmental Science and a GIS certificate. I came into my degree with a passion for deep-sea conservation, but I didn’t really know how to turn that interest into something tangible. Then, on a whim, I enrolled in a summer course called Spatial Info & GIS in Ecology, and I ended up completely obsessed with it.
What grabbed me about GIS was how it takes complex environmental data and turns it into something visual and intuitive. I love the mix of problem-solving, creativity, and future-thinking that goes into designing analyses and building maps. There’s something so satisfying about collecting data and already imagining how you’ll explore and manipulate it to reveal patterns.
My Honours research focuses on how energy and nutrients move through deep-sea coral and sponge communities at the Makkovik Hanging Gardens. This is a rare deep-sea vertical-wall ecosystem off the coast of Labrador. These environments rely on limited food inputs from the surface ocean, so understanding how sponges and predators like sea stars move nutrients through the system is important for conservation.
We already have isotope data suggesting that sea stars may be feeding on sponges. The GIS component of my project helps test this idea spatially. Using photogrammetry and spatial analysis, I take ROV video footage and manually extract the x, y coordinates of sea stars, corals, and sponges. By analyzing these spatial relationships, I can assess whether sea stars are disproportionately associated with sponges compared to corals, providing an independent line of evidence that either supports or challenges what the isotope data suggests.
Outside of GIS, I love to run, sew, and walking by the waterfront! I am so excited to be a part of this community and getting to know more people in ECCE! Here is my email Nelene.Silva@dal.ca so feel free to reach out whenever.
