Sea Change Episode 6: Dr. Maycira Costa

Today’s guest is someone who’s name came up in internet searches I did about seaweed / seaweed research / women in science. Funnily enough, it was Dafne Romero Salazar, my guest from episode 2 of Sea Change, who told me that I really had to speak to Dr. Maycira Costa about the research she’s been doing. During her time at Uni of Vic, Dr.Costa has built the SPECTRAL lab, for investigating spectral characteristics of the Earth’s surface

Dr Costa’s latest research is to discover and digitize the presence of kelp along BC’s coast by studying interaction of light energy with organic and inorganic material in water. To do this, her and her team have used satellite images from the 80’s, technology old enough to know what dial-up internet sounds like, but get this: as a total fluke, she discovered that nautical maps from the 18th and 19the century had already mapped out the presence of kelp forests along the coast.