The Tara Oceans project began with a global ocean sampling programme designed to characterize plankton communities end‑to‑end, from viruses of a few tens of nanometres to millimetre‑scale zooplankton. The Scientific Director Eric Karsenti established a consortium of scientists covering different disciplines, and between 2009 and 2013 two circumglobal expeditions (denoted Tara Oceans and Tara Oceans Polar Circle) sampled 210 stations across all major oceanic provinces using highly standardized protocols. Approximately 40,000 samples were collected and size‑fractionated to target viruses, prokaryotes, small eukaryotes, and large eukaryotes. These biological samples were analysed principally by high-throughput genomics and microscopy, and the data were integrated with extensive physico‑chemical and oceanographic contextual data. 

Since the first coordinated data release in 2015, marked by five foundational publications (Tara Oceans publication numbers 21, 22, 23, 24, 25), the Tara Oceans Consortium has produced a sustained stream of high‑impact publications addressing biodiversity, evolution, ecology, and biogeochemistry of the global ocean (link to Tara Oceans publication list). All data are openly accessible (Tara Oceans publication numbers 26, 53, 75, 100, 111, 134), enabling thousands of downstream studies well beyond the project’s original scope. Taken together, Tara Oceans perhaps represents the most comprehensive, integrated collection of datasets ever produced for any planetary biome.