The last decade has witnessed a revolution in our understanding of the functioning, ecology and evolution of plankton communities at a global scale. Environmental surveys spanning all domains of life, from bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes, DNA and RNA viruses, have been performed. Techniques have advanced from single gene surveys to whole-genome-resolved approaches, and recent years have also witnessed advances in cross-scale plankton automated imaging techniques, feedback microscopy, remote sensing from space, and the acquisition of contextual data from the water column, as well as new computational techniques for big data analysis and deep learning. As ambitious interdisciplinary oceanographic efforts and time-series sites continue to generate and release information-rich data, it is time to discuss the most notable milestones and discoveries, and to showcase how scientists can exploit these data in different ways.

The goal of the conference is to focus on the new fields of plankton science enabled in particular by 10 years of Tara Oceans research, to increase the impact of the new knowledge generated from these datasets, and to foster new collaborations among aquatic microbial ecologists, evolutionary biologists, oceanographers, cell and molecular biologists, geneticists, and more. The objective is also to identify questions we can now ask thanks to recent discoveries, and with the arrival of new technologies, methods, and concepts from all corners of the biological sciences.