WHOI Sea Grant Project Scoops Up Research to Application Award
Every two years, the Sea Grant Association announces its Research to Application Award, which honors a research project or body of research funded or implemented by one of the 34 programs in the Sea Grant network. The award recognizes work that increases citizen’s understanding and responsible use of the nation’s ocean, coastal or Great Lakes resources. The notion of research to application recognizes the ways research can inform decisions made by individuals, communities, and resource managers, and can lead to the development of new products or tools with positive impacts for a vibrant and resilient coastal economy or environment.
This year’s winner is research funded by WHOI Sea Grant into enhanced harmful algal bloom monitoring. The award was announced during the biennial Sea Grant Week, held in Georgia in August 2024.
“We’re thrilled to have the SGA recognize the value of this work by selecting it from among all the submissions,” said Jennie Rheuban, who, as WHOI Sea Grant’s research coordinator, proposed the winning project. “Harmful algal blooms can be devastating to a local economy and to individual businesses. The application of this research has improved shellfish management decision-making in Massachusetts.”
Traditional evaluation of the presence of HABs is labor intensive, slow, and requires the collection and processing of discrete water samples via microscopy. Discrete samples limit the full understanding of bloom dynamics as some stages of blooms tend to be transient, and lack of observation can lead to less accurate predictions and resulting shellfish and finfish toxicity.
WHOI Sea Grant has supported several projects, through both biennial funding and via National Strategic Investments to facilitate research into the development of sensors and technology with the capability of providing real-time, continuous information on HAB presence and bloom dynamics.
The research team, including WHOI Biologists Michael Brosnahan, Donald Anderson, Heidi Sosik, and Rob Olson as well as researchers in Florida, worked to integrate a suite of sensors that include the Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) - which acts as an automated light microscope, continuously capturing images of individual phytoplankton– and the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) - which analyzes sea water on the fly to positively identify target species and/or toxins – onto floating platforms that are commonly used in aquaculture. When integrated into these platforms, the sensors produce highly complementary data describing the diversity, abundance and toxicity of phytoplankton at monitoring sites. Deployments have successfully detected and documented the full scope and drivers of blooms of several different HAB species. Real-time data are used regularly by Massachusetts state agencies in decision-making regarding shellfish closures associated with HAB toxins.
- Feb. 2025