The TREC expedition – “Traversing European Coastlines”, which began in April 2023 and is scheduled to conclude in June next year, travels for the first time along the European coast, from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, in an initiative led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

In Portugal, the expedition has already passed through Porto and is now in the southern part of the country, chosen because it is the 'border' between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, Kiley Seitz, North American soil microbiologist and researcher at EMBL, explains to journalists.

“This is where we are leaving the Atlantic [ocean] and starting to head towards the Mediterranean [sea]. We're trying to cover a lot of different gradients, and because we have this change right here, we're going to get a good look at the impact of water and land, how it's moved in and out of the ocean,” says the researcher.

This project, unprecedented on a European scale, with analysis in more than 120 locations in 46 areas of the continent, aims to study coastal ecosystems and how organisms respond to natural environmental factors and human impact at different scales.

The TREC expedition combines the collection of samples of soil, sediments, shallow waters and organisms, by around a dozen researchers present at each stop, on land and at sea, where a laboratory boat with its own technology is used.

The first phase of the project ends in November with the next stop, in Cádiz, in neighboring Spain. The second phase runs from February to August 2024, traveling along the Mediterranean coast and ending in Malta.

“There has never been a project like this. (...) It is something unprecedented and we really hope that this will be a starting point for this type of large-scale data collection”, says the scientist, during a guided tour of the mobile laboratory, one of three vehicles involved in the expedition, temporarily installed next to the Marine Sciences Center of the University of Algarve, one of the 70 local partners involved in the project.

In this mobile laboratory, which has an oven to dry the samples and a storage space, only basic analyses are carried out, as all samples are sent to the EBML headquarters in Heidelberg, Germany, where further tests will be carried out. complete.

Scientists also collect data on pollutants, antibiotics and pesticides, but also on the specific temperature, salinity, oxygen levels and geophysical parameters of each of the areas under analysis.

By understanding how organisms and ecosystems adapt to environmental changes at the molecular and cellular level, the conclusions drawn from the project will be the basis for studying coastal and ecosystem changes in the coming years.

“We want to answer important questions, such as the impacts that humans are having on the environment. (...) All of our data will be made public and we hope to be able to start asking much bigger questions and working with very different people to define where to go from here”, says Kiley Seitz.

Obviously, he adds, “the ultimate goal would be to have bioremediation”, the process of using living organisms to reduce or remove contaminations in the ecosystem, “mediating the human impact” on nature.

A goal that “will take years and years”, he acknowledges. “Our hope is that that foundation is here so that other labs can start to help us, focusing our perspective on how we can do this better.”

The TREC expedition is led by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), together with the Tara Ocean Foundation, the Tara Oceans Consortium and the European Marine Biological Resources Center (EMBRC).

In total, the initiative brings together more than 150 research teams from more than 70 institutions in 29 European countries.