Profile

I live in Quevedo, Los Rios, Ecuador with my husband and 9-year-old kid. My pronouns are she/her. We own a cocoa farm that has a small river going by. On weekends we go there to grill meat, take pictures and swim in the river. Sometimes we work, machete in hand, which is terribly hard! We have been making our own chocolate and want to make our own brand. I am also starting to take photography seriously as well as drawing and painting. We have never finished unpacking but one day I hope to play my drumset again and ride my bike. I am also trying to start a garden with flowers and vegetables.

The river at our farm

Our cocoa farm

I work online for the UK National Oceanography Centre, lots of my life happens online, even before the pandemic. I have lots of meetings with friends and co-workers online. I used to travel a lot for work, often back to the UK and to other countries like Belize, Tanzania, Indonesia, Austria, Mexico to work with other researchers on collaborative projects, or to give an attend training. I also used to go out to sea on big research vessels for the deep open ocean or small coastal boats. So I used to spend time away from my family, from a week to a month!!! Life is totally different depending on where I am…

My NOC Liverpool office

As chief scientist, drifting buoy release, Pemba Island Tanzania, 2018

My office in Zanzibar 2007

Collecting Zooplankton Zanzibar Island, 2009

Adapted traditional East African boat as coastal research vessel. Including CTD for salinity, temperature, depth measurements, ADCP for currents measurements, Niskin bottles to collect water samples, and plankton net. Zanzibar, Tz 2009

I like to work on practical applications that can be investigated by tracking particles that get push around by currents in cyber-oceans, this allows me to figure out where things go and where things come from in the ocean which is useful for many different things.

I am currently working on 4 different projects:

1) Connectivity among oil and gas platforms in the North Sea.

There are more than 100 oil and gas subsea installations in the North Sea, most of them will be decommissioned in the next decade. Lots of sea creatures have grown on them over the years: barnacles, sponges, cold-water corals, and lots of other creatures find shelter and food in or around the structures: fish, sharks, marine birds. Originally oil companies agree with the governments than when decommissioning came they will clean up after themselves, which implies removing the subsea structures. I am part of a group of scientists investigating whether doing this will have a negative ecological effect. If the structures form an interconnected network and they are also connected to the natural habitats of the creature living in them, then they are ecologically important for the system. If they are just like isolated islands and don’t send or receive eggs and larvae from other structures or habitats then their ecological role is only local, and removing them will not impact the whole system.

Marine growth and associated fauna on a
subsea structure

2) ReCICLE: Resolving Climate Impacts on shelf and CoastaL seas Ecosystems

In this project, we are doing climate change predictions and see what are the most likely scenarios for the future ocean.  This project is focused on the UK shelf seas, again I mainly focus on the North Sea, but other colleagues look at the Celtic Sea, Irish Sea. We take the predictions of earth system models and force a regional model of the ocean around the UK, this process is called regional downscaling and suppose to give more accurate and detailed results for specific regions. Because there is lots of uncertainty in predicting the future I can’t have a single model and expect it to be correct, so I have 12 different cyber-oceans (each of them is called an ensemble member) going from 1980 to 2100. Is so much data!!. Then, I analyze them to see what is the most likely scenario in the future. Do they all give different answers? the most common answer is more likely to happen…  I use particle tracking to define connected regions which help me define “ocean provinces” areas of the ocean that are very similar and interconnected and I see how those change from the present to the future. Other colleagues are looking at how the future conditions affect the ecosystem; the nutrients, phytoplankton, and zooplankton productions.

Earth System Models (& AMM7) projection to 2095

3) Sargassum tracking in the Caribbean.

Sargassum is a floating brown algae that lives in the open ocean. There is a place called the Sargasso Sea in the middle of the Altantic Ocean, it is in the middle of an ocean gyre, so the currents keep the algae there. Since 2011 lots of this algae started to wash out in the beaches of the Caribbean, this is a big issue because it messes up the beautiful beaches, it covers the light for the corals, even baby sea turtles have trouble to come up to breath. When it washes up on the beach it decomposes its slimy and smells terrible… We can see the sargassum out in the ocean from satellites, I can track particles from these locations and predict where they will wash up on land, we are trying to creat a system that does this automatically and in real-time.

4) Lobster larvae dispersal in the leeward islands.

Scientists in these islands are investigating the possibility of doing lobster aquaculture, but they get the larvae (babies) from the wild because it is very hard to get lobster to spawn (lay eggs) in aquariums. They want to know where the lobster larvae come from, and if it is sustainable to harvest them out of the wild. So I am doing some particle tracking experiment to figure this out. Because lobster eggs and larvae are not passive, they swim up and down and prefer to stay at a certain depth as they develop I have to program particles that behave like them, I call them virtual larvae. Then I release them in the cyber ocean and see where they go. I have to be careful where and when I release them so they represent what the real lobsters are doing.

-On coastal work duty: This can involve working with the tide, which may imply getting up at crazy times like 4 am to prep stuff on small boats, go out to sea, deploy instruments, and/or collect samples, some times involves diving or snorkeling. It can be short trips or all-day work until sunset.

-On conference/workshops: Travel, get to the correct place, get to know the places needed hotel, conference center, Universities or Research Institutes, meet local collaborators, attend seminars, give seminars, teach workshops, usually there are some field trips to see local nature and culture.

-Normal days: I get up at 6:30 am, do 5 min meditation with kid, do 15 min yoga, prepare and eat breakfast, send kid to school (or connect him to online school), turn on computer, check email, plan day tasks: running models and in silico experiments and analysis (involves some coding and programming), reading, writing, meetings…