COMARGE

What is COMARGE ?

COMARGE (Continental MARGin Ecosystems on a worldwide scale) is a project of the Census of Marine Life, a decennial programme aiming at assessing and explaining the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the oceans.
The scope of COMARGE is the biota living on the seafloor of deep continental margins, between about 200 m and 4000 m depth. The project was launched in 2005 with the main purposes of:

• Increasing the understanding of biodiversity patterns on continental margins, from the local to the global scale.
• Fostering data archiving, data exchange and data access.
• Popularizing the results of the project and heightening public awareness of the diversity of continental margins.

What COMARGE does?

COMARGE is giving life to an international network of scientists who are working together in order to identify the main gaps in knowledge regarding the ecology of continental margins and collaborating in order to fill in those gaps.

A science plan for the project has been set up by an assembly of 40 scientists during a seminar held at the Institut Océanographique in Paris in July 2006. Three main topics have been highlighted for collaborative works that COMARGE supports through workshops and data integration.