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CHESS
A global study of the biogeography of deep-water chemosynthetic ecosystems and the processes that drive them. Background Directed from the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS) in the UK, the Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC), in Barcelona, Spain, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in the US, ChEss is improving our knowledge of the biodiversity and biogeography of species from deep-water chemosynthetically-driven ecosystems at a global scale and increasing our understanding of the processes that shape these communities. In order to achieve such ambitious goals, scientists from around the globe have been brought together under the ChEss umbrella to coordinate their activities focusing on ChEss scientific objectives. ChEss is addressing the main questions of CoML on diversity, abundance and distribution of marine species, within the realm of deep-water reducing environments such as hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, whale falls, sunken wood and areas of low oxygen that intersect with continental margins and seamounts. It is crucial to combine results from research on all these systems in order to understand the phylogeographic relationships amongst all deep-water chemosynthetic ecosystems. Summary provided by http://www.noc.soton.ac.uk/chess/