World Wide Web of Plankton Image Curation (WWWPIC)
PI: Jean-Olivier (Sorbonne Universite, France), Robert Cowen, Nina Hirata (Universidad de Sao Paulo, Brazil), Dhugal Lindsay (JAMSTEC, Japan)
Funding Source: the Belmont Forum
Project webpage
A collaboration between France, Japan, Brazil, and the US, the WWWPIC project is aimed at unifying and streamlining efforts of several international plankton imaging laboratories working with different underwater imaging instruments. The US part is represented by OSU’s Plankton Ecology Lab and the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB).
Technological goals include developing a common naming convention for imagery, sharing image libraries that work for multiple instruments, advancing the machine-, and deep learning aspects of the processing pipeline, establishing a high-throughput database system, implementing APIs into the database infrastructure to automatically feed plankton data to the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS), making it available to the community, and design an access system to enable outside researchers to classify imagery using our deep learning pipelines on cloud infrastructure. Ecological questions to be addressed in the second half of the project are focused on the structure and size spectra of marine food webs.
