Starting at the end of this month, a scientific expedition will begin that is unparalleled in its scale: Researchers from all over Europe will collect samples on all the continent’s coasts, both on land and in the water, to investigate the impact of humans on the environment – at the grassroots, at the smallest particles, in other words: at the molecular level. One of the questions is: How do man-made substances harm organisms in the water and on land?

The project is called TREC. This stands for „Traversing European Coastlines“. The center of these activities is in Heidelberg. The European Molecular Biology Laboratory, or EMBL for short, is where all the threads come together.

Over the next 18 months, we will continue to monitor the TREC project and tell the stories here at RNF and on RNF.de of what the researchers experience during their work when they are active at 120 sampling sites along the coasts and from the research vessel TARA in 46 regions in 22 European countries.