Marine mesozooplankton play a crucial role in the functioning of pelagic ecosystems and global biogeochemical cycles. It is very diverse from a taxonomic and phylogenetic point of view (e.g., giant protists, copepod, krill, small jellyfish, fish larvae), but also functionally (e.g., small vs. large organisms, herbivores who are filtering-courant feeders vs. carnivores who are ambush feeders, vertical migrations, lipid reserve production, etc.). Yet, the link between mesozooplankton diversity and ecosystem functioning remains poorly understood.? TRAITZOO aims to decipher this link using a trait-based approach and taking advantage of recent developments in high-throughput sequencing and imaging of marine plankton. Using already available data, that has been collected in various biogeographical provinces of the global ocean and covering wide environmental gradients, mostly collected by our consortium, we will use numerical ecology and machine learning tools to 1) provide new tools to study functional traits from imaging and transcriptomic data, 2) describe the biogeography of functional traits and identify the main drivers of mesozooplankton functional diversity, and 3) improve marine ecosystem models and develop new trait-based models to better quantify plankton-mediated carbon fluxes. Our consortium brings together experts in mesozooplankton ecology and physiology, marine biogeochemistry, and applied mathematics. Our skills cover plankton imaging, transcriptomics, metabarcoding, biogeochemical modelling, individual-based modelling, statistics, and machine learning.

European coastal ecosystems are changing as a result of interactions between a number of drivers including overfishing, pollution, and climate change. Changes in marine ecosystems will impact on human health, food safety and the future sustainability of sectors including aquaculture, fisheries and tourism. Climate projection information is plentiful and there is considerable activity in marine ecosystem impact modelling; however, a disconnect remains between delivery of this information and its effective uptake by end users and policy makers. The CoCliME project will co-develop and co-produce a set of regionally focused climate services to address key impact areas including human health, aquaculture, fisheries and tourism across the regional seas of Europe. The developed services, and associated decision support tools, will empower and support vulnerable coastal sectors to accelerate adaptive decision-making and feed into key governance mechanisms such as the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, Marine Spatial Planning, and local, national and European adaptation planning. The project team brings together a newly established consortium of boundary organisation experts in co-development of climate services with leaders in marine ecosystem research, regional ocean climate modellers, and, at its heart, a number of targeted users and decision makers in each region. The project will offer an innovative and user-focused approach and the development of a societally relevant climate service framework, in addition to the bespoke climate services, that will be transferable to other regions, impact areas, users and marine ecosystem vulnerabilities. Through a regional case study approach, the specific needs of national and European marine ecosystem impact and adaptation planners and regulatory authorities will be identified and addressed through an evidence-based and iterative process designed to feed into climate adaptation strategies across the EU and beyond.

Coastal and inland aquatic ecosystems are of fundamental interest to society and economy, given their tight link to urbanization and economic value creation. They play a significant role in the carbon cycle, and they comprise critical habitats for biodiversity. Aquatic ecosystems are continuously impacted by natural processes and human activities. Many of these impacts become more frequent and severe, particularly with increasing population and climate change. Hence, there is a need (i) to generate reliable, robust and timely evidence of how these environments are changing, (ii) to understand processes causing these changes and their societal, health, and economic consequences, and (iii) to identify steps towards conservation, restoration and sustainable use of water and dependent ecosystems, and resources. Systematic, high-quality and global observations, such as those provided by satellite remote sensing techniques, are key to understand complex aquatic systems. While multitudes of remote sensing missions have been specifically designed for studying ocean biology and biogeochemistry as well as for evaluating terrestrial environments, remote sensing missions dedicated to studying critical coastal and inland aquatic ecosystems at global scale are non-existent. Thus, these ecosystems remain among the most understudied habitats on the Earth’s surface. Specific reasons for such an observational gap lie in the dynamic and optical complexity of water ecosystems, in combination with technological challenges to optimize the relevant spatial, spectral, radiometric, and temporal characteristics. Current and forthcoming missions are either not suited to provide a global coverage (e.g., PRISMA, EnMAP) or to obtain reliable data over dark waters (e.g., carbon-rich lakes) due to inadequate radiometric sensitivity (e.g., Sentinel-2/MSI). They also fall short of requirements for characterizing biodiversity variables such as benthic habitat structure and phytoplankton assemblages due to their inadequate spatial and spectral resolution, respectively. A future satellite mission, the so-called Global Assessment of Limnological, Estuarine and Neritic Ecosystems (GALENE), is proposed to respond to current and future challenges linked to coastal and inland ecosystems. GALENE will provide optimized measurements of these aquatic ecosystems, and enable an adaptive sampling of dynamic properties and processes in water columns, benthic habitats and associated wetlands. The GALENE mission concept consists of a synergy of three innovative instruments, namely a hyperspectral sensor, a panchromatic camera and a polarimeter.

ANR-PROTECT is a fund-raising project aiming to consolidate an ongoing initiative to federate the leading European research institutes working on the contribution of land ice melt to sea-level rise. The consortium thus established will apply to the H2020 call LC-CLA-07-2019: “The changing cryosphere: uncertainties, risks and opportunities”, specifically the action on sea level changes. The foundation of a very strong multidisciplinary consortium is already laid, bringing together the leading European experts on (i) atmosphere and surface mass balance of ice sheets and glaciers, (ii) ocean and sub ice shelf melting, (ii) ice sheet flow, (iv) the coupling of these components, (v) mass balance of mountain glaciers, (vi) regional sea level changes and (vii) coastal impacts. In accordance with the requirements of LC-CLA-07-2019, the expertise of the PROTECT consortium will allow to tackle the essential societal issue of improving the regional and local projections of sea level change by including a better representation of the evolution of the cryosphere mass balance.

Marine plankton play a crucial role in the functioning of marine ecosystems and global biogeochemical cycles, but also for human populations through a number of ecosystem services. These services include: 1) the production of half of the oxygen we breathe, 2) the energy supply of marine food webs, which in turn sustain many human populations, and 3) the transfer of atmospheric carbon released by human activities to the depths of the ocean in the form of organic matter, and thus 4) the regulation of the climate of planet Earth. The application of high throughput sequencing (or metagenomic) techniques to marine plankton has recently revealed the great diversity of planktonic organisms in the ocean. However, plankton remains very coarsely represented in global biogeochemical models (using only a few "black boxes"), including in the models used by the IPCC to simulate the fate of the Earth system by 2100. This gap affects our ability to accurately predict the response of plankton communities to climate change and thus the ecosystem services provided by marine plankton. As plankton ecosystems face increasing climatic and anthropogenic pressures, there is a critical need to train a new generation of early-stage researchers (ESR) at the crossroads of complementary and yet independent scientific expertises. To meet this need, we wish to submit in January 2019 the PlankServ project in response to the European call MSCA-ITN-ETN-2019. PlankServ will provide a multinational and multidisciplinary European Training Network (ETN) that will draw on the expertise, complementarity and synergy of European research and training centers based in France, Germany, Spain, United Kingdom, and Switzerland. This European training network is also intended to include non-academic partners, such as biotechnology companies specialized in Big Data, insurance companies, NGOs and consulting firms dedicated to the management of marine ecosystems, scientific editors, and institutions for disseminating scientific culture. The ESRs will be trained in genomics, marine ecology, biogeochemistry, climate sciences and numerical modeling, but also in the manipulation of large data sets ('big data'), risk assessment, ecosystem services assessment, management of marine ecosystems, and communication to the general public and the media. These ESRs will develop unique skills that will allow them to advance their careers in various sectors of activity such as consulting, governance, communication, academia or industry. To set up this European network, the main academic partners have already been identified (and have already collaborated in several smaller projects), but we still have to mobilize the non-academic sector, a crucial point for obtaining MSCA-ITN funding, since they must represent at least 40% of the members of the network. The main purpose of the Pre-PlankServ project is to enable the mobilization of these non-academic partners. It will also make it possible to organize two meetings between the various members of the network (in addition to videoconferences planned each 3 months in 2018). The first meeting will focus on updating on the responses we would have obtained from the private partners that we would have contacted, finalizing the structure of the consortium, writing the thesis topics that will be co-supervised within the training network, and planning the training actions for each ESR and for the PlankServ network. The second meeting will finalize the drafting of the PlankServ project no later than 2 to 3 months before the closing of the MSCA-ITN call that is planned for January 2019.