The Tara Oceans Polar Circle Expedition: Macroecology of Planktonic Communities on Arctic Shelves.

The Tara Oceans Polar Circle Expedition is an international effort that aims at gaining a pan-Arctic view of the diversity, structure and function of planktonic communities in the context of the diverse environmental conditions present on the different Arctic shelves. The expedition took place during the summer and fall of 2013 on board the research schooner Tara. During the circumpolar navigation, high-resolution inline measurements of physical, chemical and optical properties of surface water were conducted and integrated with vertical profiles and discrete water samples collected at selected stations. The result is a rich dataset of physical (CTD and optical properties), chemical (e.g., nutrients, pH, pCO2, carbonates, HPLC pigments) and biological measurements of standing stocks (integrating advanced cell imagery approaches with genomic analysis), that were collected using the same methodologies across all Arctic regions and cover the entire size spectrum of plankton ’end to end’, from viruses to fish larvae. Here we provide an overview of the expedition, describe the data sets available and present initial results.