Tara Oceans: towards global ocean ecosystems biology

This article is contribution number 100 of Tara Oceans.-- 18 pages, 6 figures, 2 boxes, supplementary information https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-020-0364-5A planetary-scale understanding of the ocean ecosystem, particularly in light of climate change, is crucial. Here, we review the work of Tara Oceans, an international, multidisciplinary project to assess the complexity of ocean life across comprehensive taxonomic and spatial scales. Using a modified sailing boat, the team sampled plankton at 210 globally distributed sites at depths down to 1,000 m. We describe publicly available resources of molecular, morphological and environmental data, and discuss how an ecosystems biology approach has expanded our understanding of plankton diversity and ecology in the ocean as a planetary, interconnected ecosystem. These efforts illustrate how global-scale concepts and data can help to integrate biological complexity into models and serve as a baseline for assessing ecosystem changes and the future habitability of our planet in the Anthropocene epochTara Oceans (which includes the Tara Oceans and Tara Oceans Polar Circle expeditions) would not exist without the leadership of the Tara Ocean Foundation and the continuous support of 23 institutes (https://oceans.taraexpeditions.org/). The authors further thank the commitment of the following sponsors: the French CNRS (in particular Groupement de Recherche GDR3280 and the Research Federation for the Study of Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution FR2022/Tara GOSEE), the French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM), the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Genoscope/CEA, the French Ministry of Research and the French Government Investissements d’Avenir programmes OCEANOMICS (ANR-11-BTBR-0008), FRANCE GENOMIQUE (ANR-10-INBS-09-08) and MEMO LIFE (ANR-10-LABX-54), the PSL research university (ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02) and EMBRC-France (ANR-10-INBS-02). Funding for the collection and processing of the Tara Oceans data set was provided by the NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry Program under grants NNX11AQ14G, NNX09AU43G, NNX13AE58G and NNX15AC08G (to the University of Maine), the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Remote Sensing of Canada’s New Arctic Frontier and the Canada Foundation for Innovation. [...] C.B. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 835067) as well as the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University for a scholar’s fellowship during the 2016–2017 academic year. M.B.S. thanks the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (award 3790) and the US National Science Foundation (awards OCE#1536989 and OCE#1829831) as well as the Ohio Supercomputer for computational support. S.G.A. thanks the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CTM2017-87736-R). [...] S. Sunagawa is supported by ETH Zürich and the Helmut Horten Foundation and by funding from the Swiss National Foundation (205321_184955)With the funding support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S), of the Spanish Research Agency (AEI