Cold-water coral research is embracing a new era of ocean basin scale research - a scale vital to understand key issues like how deep coral populations are connected to one another across the depths of the ocean.

Starting in 2007 the Transatlantic Coral Ecosystem Study TRACES brought researchers from Europe, Canada and the USA together to develop a science plan to study cold-water corals at the scale of the Atlantic Ocean. In the years since then the deep coral community have increased the number of collaborations across ocean basins around the world.

In Europe this theme continued in 2016 with the launch of the Horizon 2020 funded ATLAS project studying deep coral, sponge, seamount and vent ecosystems across the North Atlantic. ATLAS and its sister project SponGES are part of the Atlantic Ocean Research Alliance.