Northeastern CSI Tapped for $1.6M WHOI Sea Grant Partnership

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Sea Grant program has announced $1.6 million in funding for four new coastal research projects — and Northeastern University’s Coastal Sustainability Institute & Marine Science Center has strong representation among the recipients.

Jennifer Bowen, a researcher at the Marine Science Center, is co-leading one of the four funded projects, Keeping Clams Clean: Tracking microbial contamination of clam flats. Working alongside Wayne Castonguay of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Bowen’s team will investigate the sources and turnover time of bacterial contamination threatening soft-shell clam harvests in Plum Island Sound — an area whose annual clam harvest was more than halved in 2023 following an unusually wet year that triggered repeated shellfish bed closures. The project will bring together molecular techniques, community science-led sampling, public databases, and machine learning to develop more efficient and information-rich methods of shellfish sanitation monitoring.

Two additional funded projects are led by alumni of the Marine Science Center & Coastal Sustainability Institute. Sarah Donelan, now at UMass Dartmouth, and Sarah Gignoux-Wolfsohn, now at UMass Lowell, are co-leading Winter is Changing: Enhancing oyster overwintering practices, which will examine the impacts of winter conditions and husbandry decisions on oyster growth, survival, and disease — providing growers with actionable data to better protect their stock through New England’s challenging winters.

The full slate of WHOI Sea Grant awards supports research on Massachusetts’ aquaculture and fisheries industries, including work on black sea bass population dynamics and oyster reef restoration using soundscape ecology. More information on all four projects is available at seagrant.whoi.edu.

Author: Sierra Muñoz