Leho Tedersoo
Professor at Tartu University
The TREC expedition started in April 2023 and lasted until the end of July 2024. During that time, the researchers gathered biological samples and environmental data along the European coastline at 115 land-sea transects. In selected sites, time-series measurements are performed to account for annual changes.
The expedition combines ocean exploration, conducted by the Tara Ocean Foundation and Tara Oceans Consortium, with parallel sampling of soil, sediment, shallow water, and selected model organisms in various habitats, supported by EMBL’s land-based Mobile Labs and local marine research institutions. Organismal diversity is being studied across scales, from viruses, bacteria, and protists to multicellular groups such as algae and animals. Analysis involves various meta- and single-cell omics as well as barcoding techniques that will be combined with innovative microscopy pipelines including automated imaging and electron microscopy. This allows unprecedented detail in associating molecular and morphological data at the single-organism and single-cell level. Besides standard oceanographic metadata, special emphasis is put on detecting metabolites as well as physical and chemical (i.e. inorganic and organic pollutants such as metals, pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics) characterization of the sampled habitats, providing the environmental framework to the biodiversity and adaptation analyses.
Overall, the expedition aims to conduct systematic, standardized, and integrated sampling with multimodal environmental metadata acquisition. This integrated profiling across environmental and man-made gradients of micro- and macroscopic life will enable us to obtain a first of the kind, pan-European census of European coastal ecosystems.
The TREC expedition is embedded in the TREC project, which is governed by the TREC consortium steering committee.
Biomes Sampling Coordinators
Soil Biology
Soil biogeochemistry
Samuel Abiven
Science director at CEREEP and research professor at ENS, CNRS
Sediments
Raffaele Siano
Researcher at IFREMER
Coastal and offshore waters
Colomban de Vargas
Tara Europa Research Director at CNRS
Shallow waters
Flora Vincent
Group leader at EMBL
Hugo Berthelot
Researcher at IFREMER
Model organisms
Detlev Arendt
Group leader and Senior scientist at EMBL
Chemical profiling
Michael Zimmermann
Group leader at EMBL
Interactive map with TREC national stops 2023/2024
To perform sampling as shown on the map above, TREC works closely with several local partner institutions along the way. Click to open an interactive map showing the national stops of the expedition and TREC activities there.
