Welcome to Ecotaxa
If you use EcoTaxa in your work, we would appreciate if you cite it as:
Picheral M, Colin S, Irisson J-O (2017). EcoTaxa, a tool for the taxonomic classification of images : http://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr
EcoTaxa was developped thanks to the support of the following organisations and projects:
Sorbonne University and the CNRS, which pay the salaries of the permanent staff responsible for supervising its development.
The Future Investments Program
which financed the development of the original version of the application through the Oceanomics project, dedicated to the analysis of Tara Oceans samples.
The Partner University Fund
funded the hardware on which EcoTaxa ran for several years and the machine learning solution it permitted, through a joint project between Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne Université) and the University of Miami.
The CNRS LEFE program
which allowed to renew the machine learning backend, through the project DL-PIC.
The Belmont Forum
which funds an overall review of the application through the WWWPIC project.
The Watertools company
which donated money to make the interface of EcoTaxa easier to translate, in Chinese in particular.
The JERICO-S3 project
which allowed the development of software pipelines to input data in EcoTaxa and supported the overall running of the service.
The Blue-Cloud project
which funded the extension of EcoTaxa's Application Programming Interface to allow it to interact with their data querying system.
The Blue-Cloud2026 project
which extended the work of the first Blue-Cloud project to allow finer querying of EcoTaxa's data through its Application Programming Interface and more accessible data thanks to the increased use of standard vocabularies.
The LOVNOWER project
with the company FOTONOWER, which explored machine learning solutions to improve the automatic classification system in EcoTaxa as well as implement a visual similarity search feature.
The DTO-BioFlow project
which facilitated the flow of high quality data from EcoTaxa to the Digital Twin of the Ocean by improving quality control procedures before EcoTaxa and in its output as a DarwinCore Archive files.
The ANERIS project
which funded the development of dedicated pipelines for the automatic processing of images using EcoTaxa as a quality checking solution.
The maintenance of the software and hardware that allows EcoTaxa to run depends on the support of its users, who can be officially billed by the Quantitative Imaging Platform of Villefranche. We would very much appreciate if you would consider setting aside some funds in your next grant for this. Contact us to estimate what would be both reasonable and useful.
The persons who made EcoTaxa possible are:
- Marc Picheral and Jean-Olivier Irisson: specifications and project supervision
- Sébastien Colin: initial specification
- Altidev, Laurent Salinas, Laurent Reese: development
- Simon-Martin Schröder, Benjamin Graham: deep learning implementation
- Amanda Elineau, Corinne Desnos, Laetitia Jalabert and the COMPLEx team of the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche (LOV): testing and feedback
Disclaimer :If you annotate images in EcoTaxa you cannot claim for any retribution from the application managers but you can then download and use the results of your work. Even if they make their best to keep the application stable and secure, the managers of the EcoTaxa application are not liable for the safekeeping of the images and associated data it hosts. You are responsible for performing regular backups.