OGS hosts the international expedition to study coastal ecosystems

The Traversing European Coastlines - TREC expedition has arrived in Trieste. TREC is an international mission to study coastal ecosystems, coordinated by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) together with the Tara Ocean Foundation and the European Marine Biology Resource Centre (EMBRC), which aims to provide a broader and deeper understanding of how ecosystems respond to natural and anthropogenic challenges by taking samples along the entire European coastline.

The expedition began in 2023 in the port of Roscoff in France and will end in mid-2024, having collected samples at 120 sites in 21 European countries, combining scientific activities on land and at sea on an unprecedented scale. In Italy, the first samples were taken in the Pisa and Naples area.

The OGS will host the TREC expedition for three weeks and support the study of the Gulf of Trieste ecosystem by also making its research infrastructures available.

In Trieste, the TREC expedition will continue the study of some model species, the "selected model species": the polychaetes Platynereis dumerilii, anemones, porifera, bivalves and seagrasses that populate the northern Adriatic Sea, in order to evaluate the genetic differences of the same samples in other parts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.