BIOcean5D (B5D) unites 26 partners from 11 European countries, to build a unique suite of protocols allowing holistic re-exploration of marine biodiversity, from viruses to mammals, from genomes to holobionts, across large spatial and temporal scales from pre-industrial to modern time. To explore coastal biodiversity across space and drivers, we realized the TREC and Tara EUROPA expeditions, during which a fleet of floating and rolling mobile laboratories synchronously collected over 70K samples for cutting-edge meta-omics analyses in 115 land-to-sea gradients along the EU coastline from Finland to Greece. This represents the largest baseline dataset to explore life across the Earth ecosystems, including local and global anthropogenic pressures. To explore biodiversity across time, B5D utilizes comparative analyses between long-term plankton time-series. These are crucial for understanding how microbial communities change over time due to ecological and evolutionary processes, and very relevant in the context of global change. Comparing marine time series from similar environments can provide valuable insights into the degree of determinism versus idiosyncrasy in microbial turnover, as well as into its relationship with functional redundancy and self-organization processes. We will showcase results from the comparison of two long-term microbial time series from the Mediterranean Sea, examining microbiome turnover at genomic, taxonomic, and population levels. B5D also explores marine coastal biodiversity changes over the last 2 centuries by analyzing ancient DNA in sediment cores. The potential of such a sedimentary paleogenomic data will be illustrated by our recent studies in the Bay of Brest (North Atlantic) and New Caledonia (South Pacific), and the ongoing Paleocore project developed in the frame of TREC and BIOcean5D

With the institutional support of the ‘Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence’ accreditation (CEX2019-000928-S)

Peer reviewed