The last supersite of the Tara Europa/TREC expedition ended in Athens a week ago. The Tara schooner opened its doors to visitors one last time, offering awareness-raising workshops and a scientific conference at the Eugenides Foundation. The various partners in this expedition met at the Niarchos Foundation in the presence many, including:
👉Theodoros Skylakakis, Minister of Environment and Energy, representative of the President of the Greek Government
👉Petros Varelidis, Secretary General of Natural Environment and Waters
👉Laurence Auer, French Ambassador to Greece
This last stop marks the end of the Tara Europa/TREC expedition, and above all the beginning of the research and analysis phase for the 23,000 marine samples and 70,000 samples on land.

From the 5th – 9th June Tara Ocean Foundation went to Venice. Sailors, scientists, and artists who are part of the ongoing expedition Tara Europa/TREC in collaboration with EMBL stopped at the heart of the “Floating City”. An opportunity to participate in the rich programming of the Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art and the UNESCO World Conference on Ocean Culture. For 20 years the DNA of the Tara Ocean Foundation has been in art and science, entities which have always been closely linked on their various expeditions. Exploration and sharing drives all crew members. Artists Laure Winants, who started her residency in Venice, and Robertina Sebjanic, who had set sail from Aarhus to Riga, offered their views on marine ecosystems through an audio-visual and sound performance in during World Ocean Day. The event marked the beginning of their partnership with the TBA 21 Foundation to bring together Ocean issues through art, in view of UNOC 2025 and beyond.

For two consecutive years, the schooner Tara is participating in the study of coastal ecosystems all along the European coast. The sampling of Tara Europa is part of the TREC expedition – Traversing European Coastlines, conceived by EMBL in collaboration with the Tara OceanS consortium, the Tara Ocean Foundation and more than 70 scientific institutions. During this expedition, a parallel study of biodiversity on land, with EMBL’s mobile laboratories, and at sea, with the schooner Tara, is carried out.
For the first time with the TREC expedition, researchers from all over Europe are studying life at all scales, from viruses to animals, along the entire European coast, in order to provide a much richer and deeper understanding of how these ecosystems respond to natural and anthropogenic challenges.