Alaska Sea Grant announces research awards

Alaska Sea Grant’s latest round of research projects stretch across the state of Alaska and the scale of life on earth. 

The five projects selected to receive Alaska Sea Grant funding from 2026-28 reach from Utqiagvik to Sitka, and focus on organisms as small as microbes and as large as gray whales. 

“This year’s projects exemplify how broad a reach Alaska Sea Grant has,” said Molly Cain, Alaska Sea Grant’s associate director for research. “They all address very different topics, but each will make a substantial contribution to our knowledge of conditions along Alaska’s coastlines and rivers.” 

A total of 22 Alaskan research teams submitted preproposals, of whom 11 were encouraged to submit full proposals. Awarded proposals were selected based on their scientific merit, relevance to Alaska’s needs, and alignment with Alaska Sea Grant’s focus areas of healthy coastal ecosystems, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, resilient communities and economies, and environmental literacy and workforce development. Each project supports a graduate student, incorporates community partners and includes an outreach plan to engage and inform the public.

The projects are summarized below. More information can be found on the Alaska Sea Grant website.

Investigating implications of increased gray whale foraging on Pacific herring eggs in Sitka Sound, Alaska: Lauren Wild, an assistant professor of applied fisheries at the University of Alaska Southeast-Sitka, will lead researchers tracking gray whales feeding in Sitka Sound and evaluating their feeding strategies on Pacific herring eggs. Additional team members are University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Research Assistant Professor Ellen Chenoweth and a UAF master’s student. The team will conduct photo ID surveys and tagging efforts to track demographics of the foraging whales, and they will tag 6-8 whales to record data such as interaction with the substrate and prey, foraging depths, and feeding rates. The number of gray whales converging on Sitka Sound in the spring to feed on herring has increased dramatically in recent years, and the research will help determine what implications this could have for local herring populations. 

Ecosystem services of farmed macroalgae: Tracking the fate of kelp detritus in the coastal food web: Sarah Mincks, an associate professor of marine biology at UAF, will lead experiments at four intertidal sites in Kachemak Bay to evaluate the rates and pathways of kelp detritus processing in the Alaskan nearshore. Additional researchers on the project team are UAF Associate Professor of Marine Biology Amanda Kelley and Akiva Gebler, a UAF marine biology master’s student. The team will introduce pulses of stable isotope-labeled kelp detritus to the sediment surface and track the detritus through the food web. The ultimate goal of the project is to gather data to better understand the benefits of growing kelp to the coastal ecosystem.

Early-life environmental requirements of chum salmon in a changing North: Matthew Gilbert, an assistant professor of animal physiology at UAF, will lead a team assessing the significance of environmental factors in the spawning and development of chum salmon in Northwest Alaska. Additional team members are UAF research professional Will Samuel and UAF doctoral student Emily Williams. The research team will conduct stream surveys at chum spawning sites on the Noatak River and in nearshore areas around Kotzebue where spawning and early rearing take place. They’ll also conduct a laboratory study, monitoring salmon performance in different conditions at both the embryo and fry stages. 

Mercury release from thawing permafrost: Emily Seelen, an assistant professor of chemical oceanography at UAF, will lead a study to identify landscape “hotspots” with the potential to release significant levels of mercury due to permafrost thaw. Also on the project team are Edda Mutter, science director of the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, and a master’s student. The team will sample soil pits and riverbanks for mercury in the Fairbanks, Huslia and Alakanuk areas of the Yukon River watershed. They’ll thaw permafrost soils from these sites in the laboratory to directly quantify their potential to leach mercury. They’ll identify mercury hotspots and target them for stable isotope analysis. This will enable them to quantify the rates at which mercury at these sites is transformed by microbes into methylmercury, which is a bioaccumulative toxin. 

Building towards locally sustained monitoring of harmful algal bloom species Alexandrium catenella in Utqiagvik: Kay McMonigal, an assistant professor of physical oceanography at UAF, will lead an effort to sample for harmful algal blooms (HABs) in the Arctic Ocean near Utqiagvik to better understand the sources of the blooms and to inform future monitoring. Additional team members are anthropologist Anne Garland of the nonprofit Applied Research in Environmental Sciences (ARIES), and a UAF oceanography master’s student. Community members will measure temperature and salinity and take water samples every two weeks during the summers of 2026 and 2027. The research team will gain valuable information on oceanographic factors associated with the occurrence of harmful algal species.