INFORMATION:(Late) sprint cleaning! EcoTaxa is growing but also getting a bit messy. It would be great if you could and delete the various "tests", "subsets for checking" or "copy" versions of your projects, before the summer break. They add up to a significant part of the data.

To transfer identifications from project A to project B, export project A in "Classification only" mode and import the file into project B in "Update metadata" mode (and tick "Allow update of classification data").
This is a major new version of EcoTaxa, which now uses the WoRMS taxonomy!

As a consequence, the taxa lineages have changed and various features had to be adapted. Some categories have been deprecated in favour of likely WoRMS replacements (see the full list). If you find bugs, please report them on GitHub by clicking 'New Issue' and following the bug report template.

Release notes for the current version of EcoTaxa are here.

If you want to automate anything related to EcoTaxa, it is now possible thanks to EcoTaxa's Application Programming Interface. You can browse the documentation of the API and use the corresponding Python or R packages.

EcoTaxa hosts over 700 million images from ~900 institutions and 4500 users.
Explore images

As a visitor, you have free access to a subset of the images that have been already identified by users.

Images can be filtered according to several criteria: taxonomy, geographic location, depth, date and time of sampling, and imaging instrument.

Contribute to a project

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 quick annotation of large image datasets, such as supervised machine learning prediction and visual similarity search.

Browse the collectionsnew

A collection is a set of similar projects that can be explored together (legs of a cruise, years of a time series, etc.) or a single project that constitutes a full dataset.
After adding metadata and choosing a license, the data is ready to be exported and published in DarwinCore archive format, OBIS or GBIF.

The EcoPart application is designed to manage data from Underwater Vision Profiler (UVP) instruments.
It allows:

  • Importing particle data and linking them with CTD data and zooplankton images annotated in Ecotaxa.
  • Computing size spectra from particle data.
  • Downloading particle spectra, CTD data, and zooplankton records based on user permissions.
EcoPart also provides simple data visualization and facilitates data sharing.

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!

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.

V 3.0.9.1.2026-04-29
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