The BIOICE project (1991-2004) initiated by Iceland is the basis for the follow-up project IceAGE. Over 140 scientists were and are involved in the evaluation of BIOICE material. An EU-funded (Large Scale Facility and Access to Research Infrastructure) sorting centre in Sandgerði (Iceland) provided technical support for the BIOICE project and will carry out the pre-sorting for the IceAGE samples directly on site.
Due to the deep stations in the North Atlantic areas (Irminger Basin and Iceland Basin) there is a link to ongoing deep-sea projects within the framework of CeDAMar ("Census of the Diversity of Abyssal Marine Life"), the German contribution to the international "Census of Marine Life" (CoML). The Atlantic deep-sea basins are sampled with FS Meteor within the framework of DIVA (Latitudinal Grandients of Deep-Sea Bioidiversity in the Atlantic Ocean). The comparison of the faunal composition in the different deep-sea basins will provide information on the size of the distribution areas of species in the deep sea and thus allow conclusions regarding the biogeography.
Together with the Atlantic stations sampled further south in the framework of DIVA 1-4, the deep-sea ethos of the entire Atlantic will for the first time be recorded comprehensively, quantitatively and across all size classes, thus providing an overall picture which, thanks to the data from our Icelandic cooperation partner of deep-sea stations in the BIOICE programme, will be supplemented and rounded off. The voyage applied for here will complement the sampling of the deep-sea basins in the North Atlantic outside the BIOICE station network and should enable a comprehensive characterisation of the deep-sea fauna of this ocean and the transition to the Arctic fauna.
In cooperation with the Canadian Center for DNA-Barcoding and the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C. USA), the BIOICE follow-up project IceAGE will contribute to the Marine Barcode of Life at (MarBOL). Furthermore, the project will be linked to corresponding activities within Europe via the European Consortium for the Barcode of Life (ECBOL) within the framework of CeDAMar.