Heather’s roles with PacMARA are to provide sound scientific advice on the use of ecosystem-based management and marine spatial planning in a BC context, lead development and delivery of training programs in marine spatial planning, research best practices for sound integrated marine planning, and add support to business planning and fundraising efforts. She has coordinated a number of courses on Marxan for government, First Nations, researchers, consultants, and NGOs, and has led workshops on conservation planning for Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Parks Canada, and others.

Contact Heather at hcoleman (at) pacmara.org.

After completing her program in Spain, Norma traveled to Victoria to work as a research assistant with Dr. Rosaline Canessa for 6 month.  Her main tasks were the visualization and exploratory analysis of observed oil spills and surveillance flights performed in the west coast of Canada.   In January 2008, she enrolled at University of Victoria to pursue her M.Sc. in the Geography Department, with Dr. Rosaline Canessa and Dr. Patrick O’Hara (CWS-EC) as supervisors.  She completed her M.Sc. in July 2010 on modelling chronic oil pollution events off the west coast of Canada.  After that, Norma became Project Manager of Oil in Canadian Waters project.  This two-year project is funded by Transport Canada and Environment Canada and focus on building an statistical model to predict illicit oil spills occurrences in the Atlantic, Pacific and Great Lakes regions, as well as the analysis of shipping traffic patterns in the Altantic, Pacific and Arctic waters.

Norma’s roles with PacMARA as Program Manager are to represent PacMARA locally, participate in activities related to marine ecosystem based management, marine spatial planning and associated science policy development, investigate and act on opportunities that may arise from local, regional and international marine planning and activities, assist the PacMARA Science Advisor in organization and delivery of PacMARA training courses and publications locally, regionally and internationally, and assist in the writing of funding proposals and reports.

Norma Serra-Sogas can be contacted at nserra(at) pacmara.org