Holding a post-doctoral position at the Laboratory for Sedimentary Petrology, Anne-Christine Da Silva has been interested in the Frasnian stage for several years. Two of her recent articles earned her the Edmond de Selys Longchamps prize, a quinquennial prize awarded by the Belgian Royal Academy for Sciences, Arts and Fine Arts. In particular she studies the environmental reef which developed around Belgium at this time. "We talk about a carbonate platform: with a succession of classic environments - namely a lagoon, a barrier reef and a deep, more clayey area. However, the platform which has formed in Belgium is somewhat unique," the researcher points out immediately, "because in the deep zone we find mud mounds or carbonate buildups, sort of pockets of carbonates which reach kilometric proportions. The reef is a fundamental element of the carbonate platform. Within the reef, diversity is at its greatest. Studying it provides the greatest amount of information on ancient marine fauna. But the reefs are also ecosystems which are extremely sensitive to environmental conditions, and the slightest change affects them - this can be seen today with the weakening of major coral barriers. Fossil reefs can therefore provide us with information on past climates. They are also consumers of large amounts of CO₂. Hence the value in understanding how they operate and evolve at a time when change threatens to affect us all."

The work of the young researcher focused more specifically upon the small inhabitants of reef environments: stromatoporoids, or fossil sponges. Stromatoporoids were the main reef-building organisms in the Frasnian stage. They generally take the form of laminar, branching and domical or rounded shapes. Anne-Christine Da Silva started the considerable undertaking of describing the fauna in detail and studying its distribution within Belgium's carbonate platform.