Scientific Data (Jun 2023)

Open science resources from the Tara Pacific expedition across coral reef and surface ocean ecosystems

  • Fabien Lombard,
  • Guillaume Bourdin,
  • Stéphane Pesant,
  • Sylvain Agostini,
  • Alberto Baudena,
  • Emilie Boissin,
  • Nicolas Cassar,
  • Megan Clampitt,
  • Pascal Conan,
  • Ophélie Da Silva,
  • Céline Dimier,
  • Eric Douville,
  • Amanda Elineau,
  • Jonathan Fin,
  • J. Michel Flores,
  • Jean-François Ghiglione,
  • Benjamin C. C. Hume,
  • Laetitia Jalabert,
  • Seth G. John,
  • Rachel L. Kelly,
  • Ilan Koren,
  • Yajuan Lin,
  • Dominique Marie,
  • Ryan McMinds,
  • Zoé Mériguet,
  • Nicolas Metzl,
  • David A. Paz-García,
  • Maria Luiza Pedrotti,
  • Julie Poulain,
  • Mireille Pujo-Pay,
  • Joséphine Ras,
  • Gilles Reverdin,
  • Sarah Romac,
  • Alice Rouan,
  • Eric Röttinger,
  • Assaf Vardi,
  • Christian R. Voolstra,
  • Clémentine Moulin,
  • Guillaume Iwankow,
  • Bernard Banaigs,
  • Chris Bowler,
  • Colomban de Vargas,
  • Didier Forcioli,
  • Paola Furla,
  • Pierre E. Galand,
  • Eric Gilson,
  • Stéphanie Reynaud,
  • Shinichi Sunagawa,
  • Matthew B. Sullivan,
  • Olivier P. Thomas,
  • Romain Troublé,
  • Rebecca Vega Thurber,
  • Patrick Wincker,
  • Didier Zoccola,
  • Denis Allemand,
  • Serge Planes,
  • Emmanuel Boss,
  • Gaby Gorsky

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01757-w
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 1
pp. 1 – 25

Abstract

Read online

Abstract The Tara Pacific expedition (2016–2018) sampled coral ecosystems around 32 islands in the Pacific Ocean and the ocean surface waters at 249 locations, resulting in the collection of nearly 58 000 samples. The expedition was designed to systematically study warm-water coral reefs and included the collection of corals, fish, plankton, and seawater samples for advanced biogeochemical, molecular, and imaging analysis. Here we provide a complete description of the sampling methodology, and we explain how to explore and access the different datasets generated by the expedition. Environmental context data were obtained from taxonomic registries, gazetteers, almanacs, climatologies, operational biogeochemical models, and satellite observations. The quality of the different environmental measures has been validated not only by various quality control steps, but also through a global analysis allowing the comparison with known environmental large-scale structures. Such publicly released datasets open the perspective to address a wide range of scientific questions.