Largest assessment of Atlantic deep-sea ecosystems gets underway

Scientists from the University of Liverpool have joined forces with teams across 10 European countries, the USA, and Canada to undertake the largest and most ambitious assessment of deep-sea Atlantic ecosystems ever undertaken. With support from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 funding programme, the €9 million ATLAS (A trans-Atlantic assessment and deep-sea ecosystem-based spatial management plan for Europe) project, launched this week in Scotland, marking the beginning of a series of expeditions involving at least 25 research cruises over the next four years. Professor George Wolff, Lead investigator for the University of Liverpool's School of Environmental Sciences , said: "This exciting project is vital in protecting vulnerable oceanic ecosystems. We will focus our efforts on cold-water corals, hot spots of biodiversity, but which are threatened by human activity and ocean acidification. We will be using molecular and isotopic techniques to understand how the coral ecosystems tick." Future shifts ATLAS will strive to improve understanding of the complexity of deep-sea ecosystems and to predict future shifts and vulnerabilities of these ecosystems and their associated species, including those that are new to science. Alongside traditional approaches, ATLAS scientists will explore modern molecular techniques, such as environmental DNA (eDNA) sequencing, to search water and sediment samples for known and undiscovered deep-sea species. ATLAS Project , Professor J. Murray Roberts, from Heriot-Watt University, said: "The north Atlantic was the birthplace of deep-sea biology and the cradle of oceanography.