Elaine Fileman is a very experienced plankton ecologist currently working in the Marine Ecology & Biodiversity group (MEB) at PML. She is a Plymouth biological sciences graduate with a MPhil from the University of Southampton.
Elaine’s early work specifically focused on the trophic role of microzooplankton in the marine food web; her published research has examined the relationships between these planktonic predators and their prey in a range of ecosystems including oceanic (NE Atlantic, Indian Ocean, Bellingshausen Sea), continental shelf (Celtic Sea, Iberian upwelling) and coastal waters (Plymouth). She has since broadened her interests to include zooplankton feeding, their response to UV and their interactions with microplastic particles in the marine environment.
In 2012, Elaine lead the development of the PML FlowCam facility which is mainly used for automated imaging of plankton from the Western Channel Observatory’s time series stations. The facility has been further used extensively by PhD & Masters students, visiting co-workers and for commercial applications. Elaine’s most recent activities have involved pioneering image recognition and machine learning approaches to the classification of plankton and she played a key role in PML’s recent successful bid to build an automated offshore plankton imaging facility. In this PML will be acquiring two novel in-situ camera systems for plankton visualisation that will bring new capability and visibility to PML and Smart Sound Plymouth.