By aligning two separately funded initiatives on a single field campaign, the European Commission and ESA have demonstrated how coordinated investments can increase the scientific and operational value of marine observations across Europe’s coasts.
Between April 2023 and June 2024, the iconic 36-metre schooner Tara, operated by the Tara Ocean Foundation as a floating laboratory, sailed Europe’s coastline as part of the TRaversing European Coastlines (TREC) expedition. Calling at more than 120 coastal sites from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, researchers sampled the biology and chemistry of the land–sea interface with the ambition to generate a one-of-a-kind, multi-disciplinary dataset on European coastal marine life.
TREC’s sampling efforts are shared, among others, with the European Commission’s Horizon Europe project BIOcean5D, a consortium of 31 partners across 11 countries investigating how marine life changes across three-dimensional space, time, and human impact. From viruses and bacteria to plankton and fish larvae, BIOcean5D aims to build a new, integrated picture of European coastal biodiversity, with TREC as its central field campaign.
Recognising the unique opportunity created by this expedition, ESA funded the HYPERBOOST project as an official associated project of TREC and BIOcean5D. HYPERBOOST’s mandate is to complement the biological sampling with dedicated optical measurements that the Earth observation community urgently needs for validating satellite ocean colour products and prepare exploitation of future hyperspectral missions (e.g. CHIME).
Two funding streams, one shared platform: smarter cooperation for amplified science
HYPERBOOST–BIOcean5D shows what smarter European cooperation can look like in practice: two complementary projects by EC and ESA, aligned around a single field platform, generating scientific value well beyond the sum of their parts.
The collaboration transformed the Tara vessel into an integrated research platform: a biological observatory for BIOcean5D and an optical validation platform for the Earth observation community. This alignment expanded the scientific scope of both investments and increased the return on public funding through coordination, not duplication.
For BIOcean5D, the added value came through advanced optical instrumentation that provide an environmental context that greatly enriches the interpretation of BIOcean5D’s biodiversity data. For HYPERBOOST, the expedition provided access to an exceptional sampling framework across more than 120 coastal sites, enabling continuous hyperspectral absorption, attenuation, and radiometric measurements, gathered in synchrony with biological sampling.
The outcome is a unique in-situ dataset spanning the full biogeochemical and optical diversity of European coastal waters: from turbid, river-influenced estuaries to the oligotrophic blue waters of the open Mediterranean. This dataset is an invaluable contribution to the validation of current satellite missions (Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, PACE) and is explicitly designed to prepare the exploitation of next-generation hyperspectral sensors (CHIME, S2-NG).
While the open-access dataset will soon be officially released and made public, several peer-reviewed papers, capturing the full scientific harvest of this collaboration, are now in preparation: spanning instrument methodology, novel bio-optical algorithms, and the first systematic satellite ocean colour validation exercise using a coherent, pan-European in-situ dataset. This is European cooperation at its best: not parallel funding, but deliberately connected science.
Looking ahead: from ocean colour to ocean life
The HYPERBOOST–BIOcean5D alliance shows what European scientists can achieve when European and ESA investments are designed to complement one another: stronger science, better use of existing infrastructure, and datasets with long-term value across disciplines.
The collaborative outcome also enables a wider, global ambition: using satellite observations to directly monitor ocean biodiversity. This is the direction taken by Plank2Space, a new three-year ESA project that aims to link plankton DNA meta-omics directly to satellite ocean colour observations. The project aims to generate a large globally consistent in-situ dataset, collected by 20 sailing ships of opportunity (seatizens boats selected by the project partner Seatizens for Plankton Planet association (S4P2)) to sampling plankton communities for DNA-sequencies analysis across more than 1,200 matchup sites worldwide, and correlating hyperspectral and multispectral reflectances from PACE, S-2, S-3, and OC-CCI with this biodiversity data. A first outcome of the project is the release of the PlanktoSpace app allowing the selected seatizens to best choose the time and location of sampling to optimize the satellite/in-situ matchup.
As Europe prepares the upcoming Horizon Europe call HORIZON-CL6-2027-01-BIODIV-01 (Integrating Remote Sensing and in-situ observations for Biodiversity), the experience of HYPERBOOST and BIOcean5D offers a strong example of how coordinated investments, interoperable data, and shared scientific infrastructure can help build a more connected biodiversity observation framework. Scientists are invited to find suitable consortia for application in 2027.