The Institut de la MEr de Villefranche (IMEV), formerly known as the Observatoire Océanologique de Villefranche-sur-Mer (OOV), is located on the Ligurian coast between Nice and Monaco in the bay of Villefranche which is known internationally for its richness of offshore pelagic organisms. IMEV was formerly a small research marine station. established in 1885 by Alexis de Korotneff (University of Kiev) and Carl Vogt (University of Geneva) in buildings leased from the Russian Navy. Since the 1930s, the facility has been administered by the University of Paris. Today, IMEV is composed of two joint laboratories (LBDV: Developmental Biology Laboratory and LOV: Oceanography Laboratory) and has become a world-renown research and training centre in marine ecology, oceanography and developmental biology, with about 200 staff on a 10,000 m2 campus. It is jointly operated by the Sorbonne Université (SU) (ex-UPMC), the French partner of ASSEMBLE Plus, and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
IMEV operates and maintains one of the three longest-running deep marine environmental monitoring stations in the world, and an important long-term pelagic observation programme. IMEV’s research topics include developmental biology, pelagic and coastal oceanography at regional and global scales, biological and biogeochemical cycles in marine environment, carbon cycling, phytoplankton production and biological diversity of zooplankton communities.