Best practices and recommendations for plankton imaging data management: Ensuring effective data flow towards European data infrastructures

Abstract

The best practices and recommendations for plankton imaging data management enable users to report a detailed taxonomic characterisation of plankton observations as well as quantitative information that is useful for ecological studies. This format allows biodiversity data portals to extend their scope beyond species occurrence data. Furthermore, proposing the use of more Darwin Core fields in this format, users now have the possibility to publish manually validated datasets, but also datasets produced by fully automated plankton identification workflows. The proposed data and file formats are simple and both human- and machine-readable to automatise workflows. This format will allow data generators to submit enriched plankton imaging datasets to the international biodiversity data portals, (Eur)OBIS and EMODnet Biology. We encourage plankton imaging data generators to implement these workflows into their pipelines, to share their data with the international data portals easily, enriching these databases with this valuable data.