Four ambitious ideas to advance ocean health and sustainability

Four Stanford teams will bring their ingenuity and strengths across disciplines to develop solutions for ocean sustainability, supported by a total of $600,000 from the Big Ideas for Oceans grant program.

The seed grants are jointly awarded by the Oceans Department and the Woods Institute for the Environment, which are both in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

“The Big Ideas for Oceans grants empower research teams to go after high-risk ideas with potential for high returns and positive impact on ocean health and sustainability,” said Oceans Department chair Fiorenza Micheli, the David and Lucile Packard Professor in Marine Science and co-director of the Center for Ocean Solutions. “We are grateful for the critical support of MAC3 Impact Philanthropies and the Woods Institute for the Environment and Oceans Department in the Doerr School of Sustainability in enabling breakthrough insights and solutions for oceans and people.”

This year’s research teams will explore novel baleen whale tagging technology to reduce ship strikes, causes of seagrass wasting disease in the tropical Pacific, how to bioengineer algae for marine resilience, and methods to monitor sea stars using environmental DNA. 

Launched in 2023, the Big Ideas for Oceans awards encourage collaborations that span academic focus, career stages, and geographies. Priority regions include the tropical Pacific, where coastal nations face threats from sea level rise, climate-driven natural disasters, and the loss of food, culture, and livelihoods from ecosystem degradation, and Antarctica, which plays a crucial yet understudied role in global climate regulation.

Previous grant awardees have contributed to meaningful insights and solutions, from helping to establish a new marine protected area that integrates cultural heritage to solving a mystery of disappearing Antarctic sea ice.

The Big Ideas for Oceans program, which provides grants of $10,000 to $150,000 for up to two years, is supported and administered by the Woods Institute for the Environment’s Environmental Venture Projects program. Learn more about the 2026 recipients below.

Forecasting prey hotspots to prevent whale mortality from ship strikes

Jeremy Goldbogen (Lead PI)
Leif Thomas (Co-PI)

Ship strikes are a leading cause of mortality for endangered baleen whales. They tend to occur where shipping lanes intersect with whale foraging habitats. Although marine management agencies have protected many of the broad regions where whales tend to forage, these are static, fixed to geographical features. However, whales’ prey moves in time and space as it is transported by ocean currents. Therefore, effective protection of whales will require responsive management that adjusts to variability in prey distributions. For this project, researchers will use animal-borne tags that integrate technology to track whale movement and feeding with a newly available salinity and temperature sensor for measuring signatures of ocean currents. The tags will be deployed for the first time on foraging baleen whales along the coast of California, an area poised for increased shipping and fishing, given the location of major ports and abundant fish stocks. Vessel-mounted acoustic sensors will map prey, linking whale behavior to prey distribution. Using whales as oceanographers, the team aims to fill in critical gaps in understanding the mechanisms that govern how, when, and where prey hotspots form in the ocean. Ultimately, the research will provide data to help forecast foraging hotspots using ocean circulation models and dynamically manage protected areas to prevent whale mortality and limit economic disruptions from collisions.

Investigating an epidemic of seagrass wasting disease in Palau

Giulio De Leo (Lead PI)
Barnabas Daru (Co-PI)
Fiorenza Micheli (Co-PI)

Seagrass meadows reduce coastal erosion, serve as nurseries for marine organisms, store carbon, improve water quality, and reduce pathogens linked to human disease. Marine diseases like seagrass wasting disease (SWD) pose an emerging threat to these ecosystems but are notoriously tricky to track. Previous research has focused on eelgrass in temperate zones, but a better understanding of tropical seagrass and its vulnerabilities to marine disease is essential to prevent losses and restore crucial ecosystems. This project will bring together a team with expertise in field ecology and molecular biology to investigate the causes of SWD in Palau’s tropical seagrass ecosystems. In collaboration with the Palau International Coral Reef Center, the researchers will generate critical new insights into the drivers of SWD and its impact on overall seagrass meadow health. They will share knowledge with local communities in Palau to develop monitoring efforts.

‘Molecular stargazing’ to monitor critically endangered sunflower sea stars

Alexandria Boehm (Lead PI)
Christine Baker (Co-PI)

The sunflower sea star (Pycnopodia helianthoides)  is a keystone species in California kelp forest ecosystems. However, sea star wasting disease, coastal pollution, and stress from climate change has nearly wiped them out in recent years. Without a natural predator, populations of voracious purple sea urchins have exploded and devastated kelp forests through intensive grazing. Tracking healthy sunflower sea stars and reintroducing them to their historic range can help, but the remaining healthy populations are often found in remote locations that are difficult to consistently monitor with direct observation. Biomonitoring with environmental DNA (eDNA) – fragments of genetic material like skin cells and mucus that organisms leave behind – offers a powerful solution for indirect monitoring, but more research is needed to improve sampling techniques and analysis. For this project, researchers will test how eDNA from sunflower sea stars sheds, decays, and moves through the ocean. The results will enable the team to design a California-wide eDNA sampling protocol for sunflower sea stars that can directly inform kelp restoration efforts.

Genetically engineering symbiotic algae to enhance marine resilience

Bo Wang (Lead PI)
Stephen Palumbi (Co-PI)

Photosymbiosis is the partnership between animals and photosynthetic microorganisms, for example, the relationship between corals and algae. Conserving marine ecosystems threatened by warming and acidification requires the ability to identify genetic traits in algae that are related to resilience, such as heat tolerance or the capacity to colonize a host. Despite decades of research, most symbiotic algae cannot be cultured apart from their hosts, and existing tools cannot genetically transform algae with resilient genes at the scale needed to restore ecosystems. Focusing on tropical reefs, this research team will leverage new technologies to test culture conditions for coral symbionts and to manipulate genes that may play a key role in heat tolerance. By addressing these key bottlenecks through engineering and biological approaches, the team aims to enable broader research into symbiotic algal relationships and enhance their role in supporting ocean resilience.

Learn more about research funding opportunities at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment