Ecotaxa

Release notes for the current version of EcoTaxa are here.

Ecotaxa hosts today more than 500 millions images from more than 800 institutions and 3500 taxonomists.

In addition to the Ecotaxa application, the new EcoTaxoGuide application explains how to taxonomically classify images acquired through various instruments and how to disambiguate similar-looking objects. These will become available directly from EcoTaxa in the future
This is a beta version and improvements are ongoing. We have already filled the information for many taxa seen on ZooScan images and have begun for images of the UVP and Flowcam/Planktoscope. If you do not find your taxon/instrument of interest, you can register and create it. Be sure to read the embedded HOW TO page first and please contact piqv@imev-mer.fr for better coordination.
We hope that this resource will prove useful!

Explore images

As a visitor, you have free access to the specimens that have been already identified by taxonomist experts.

You can explore the database by navigating along the UniEuk taxonomic tree which aims at unifying taxonomic names and tree according to reliable and curated molecular phylogenies. It encompasses the whole Eukaryotic and Prokaryotic lineages (Viruses coming soon) that have been molecularly described. Then images can be filtered according to several sample criteria: geographic location, depth, date and time of sampling, and imaging instrument.

Contribute to a project

As a scientist, you can contribute to the richness of this image database and/or to the collaborative taxonomic annotation effort. Images are organised in projects which should be consistent in terms of sampling and imaging techniques. We provide tools to support the annotation of large image datasets by supervised machine learning prediction.

Particle module

The PARTICLE module of ECOTAXA is designed to host data from the Underwater Vision Profiler (UVP) and the LIIST instruments.
It permits to:

Load particle data and associate them with CTD data and zooplankton images loaded and annotated in Ecotaxa
Process size spectra from the particle data
Download the resulting particle spectra, the CTD and the zooplankton data according to defined permissions
Visualize data and permit their promotion thanks to the internet access

EcoTaxa is not responsible for the safekeeping of the images and data it stores. Even if the application managers make their best to secure them. We advise you to perform your own backups.

People annotating images in EcoTaxa cannot claim for any retribution but they can download and use the results of their work. The application can be freely downloaded and installed for scientific usage.

If you use EcoTaxa in your work, we would appreciate that you cite it as: Picheral M, Colin S, Irisson J-O. EcoTaxa, a tool for the taxonomic classification of images. http://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr

For any problem please contact piqv@imev-mer.fr.

EcoTaxa has been developped thanks to the support of many organisations and projects.