Here, we provide plankton image data that was sorted with the web applications EcoTaxa and MorphoCluster. The data set was used for image classification tasks as described in Schröder et. al (in preparation) and does not include any geospatial or temporal meta-data. Plankton was imaged using the Underwater Vision Profiler 5 (Picheral et al. 2010) in various regions of the world's oceans between 2012-10-24 and 2017-08-08. This data publication consists of an archive containing  "training.csv" (list of 392k training images for classification, validated using EcoTaxa), "validation.csv" (list of 196k validation images for classification, validated using EcoTaxa), "unlabeld.csv" (list of 1M unlabeled images), "morphocluster.csv" (1.2M objects validated using MorphoCluster, a subset of "unlabeled.csv" and "validation.csv") and the image files themselves. The CSV files each contain the columns "object_id" (a unique ID), "image_fn" (the relative filename), and "label" (the assigned name). The training and validation sets were sorted into 65 classes using the web application EcoTaxa (http://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr). This data shows a severe class imbalance; the 10% most populated classes contain more than 80% of the objects and the class sizes span four orders of magnitude. The validation set and a set of additional 1M unlabeled images were sorted during the first trial of MorphoCluster (https://github.com/morphocluster). The images in this data set were sampled during RV Meteor cruises M92, M93, M96, M97, M98, M105, M106, M107, M108, M116, M119, M121, M130, M131, M135, M136, M137 and M138, during RV Maria S Merian cruises MSM22, MSM23, MSM40 and MSM49, during the RV Polarstern cruise PS88b and during the FLUXES1 experiment with RV Sarmiento de Gamboa. The following people have contributed to the sorting of the image data on EcoTaxa: Rainer Kiko, Tristan Biard, Benjamin Blanc, Svenja Christiansen, Justine Courboules, Charlotte Eich, Jannik Faustmann, Christine Gawinski, Augustin Lafond, Aakash Panchal, Marc Picheral, Akanksha Singh and Helena Hauss In Schröder et al. (in preparation), the training set serves as a source for knowledge transfer in the training of the feature extractor. The classification using MorphoCluster was conducted by Rainer Kiko. Used labels are operational and not yet matched to respective EcoTaxa classes.

Plankton was sampled with various nets, from bottom or 500m depth to the surface, in many oceans of the world. Samples were imaged with a ZooScan. The full images were processed with ZooProcess which generated regions of interest (ROIs) around each individual object and a set of associated features measured on the object (see Gorsky et al 2010 for more information). The same objects were re-processed to compute features with the scikit-image toolbox http://scikit-image.org. The 1,451,745 resulting objects were sorted by a limited number of operators, following a common taxonomic guide, into 98 taxa, using the web application EcoTaxa http://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr. For the purpose of training machine learning classifiers, the images in each class were split into training, validation, and test sets, with proportions 70%, 15% and 15%. The folder ZooScanNet_data.tar contains : taxa.csv.gz Table of the classification of each object in the dataset, with columns : - objid: unique object identifier in EcoTaxa (integer number) - taxon_level1: taxonomic name corresponding to the level 1 classification - lineage_level1: taxonomic lineage corresponding to the level 1 classification - taxon_level2: name of the taxon corresponding to the level 2 classification  - plankton: if the object is a plankton or not (boolean) - set: class of the image corresponding to the taxon (train : training, val : validation, or test) - img_path: local path of the image corresponding to the taxon (of level 1), named according to the object id features_native.csv.gz Table of metadata of each object including the different features processed by ZooProcess. All features are computed on the object only, not the background. All area/length measures are in pixels. All grey levels are in encoded in 8 bits (0=black, 255=white). With columns: - objid: unique object identifier in EcoTaxa (integer number) And 48 features: - area - mean - stddev - mode - min/max - perim. - width,height  - major,minor - circ. - feret - intden - median - skew,kurt - %area - area_exc - fractal - skelarea - slope - histcum1,2,3 - nb1,2,3 - symetrieh,symetriev - symetriehc,symetrievc - convperim,convarea - fcons - thickr:  - esd - elongation - range - centroids - sr - perimareaexc - feretareaexc - perimferet/perimmajor - circex - cdexc See the “ZooScan” sheet - OBJECT metadata, annotation and measurements - , at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14704250 for definitions. features_skimage.csv.gz Table of morphological features recomputed with skimage.measure.regionprops on the ROIs produced by ZooProcess. See http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/api/skimage.measure.html#skimage.measure.regionprops for documentation. inventory.tsv Tree view of the taxonomy and number of images in each taxon, displayed as text. With columns : - lineage_level1: taxonomic lineage corresponding to the level 1 classification - taxon_level1: name of the taxon corresponding to the level 1 classification - n: number of objects in each taxon class          2. Second folder ZooScanNet_imgs.tar contains : imgs Directory containing images of each object, named according to the object id objid and sorted in subdirectories according to their taxon.         3. And : map.png Map of the sampling locations, to give an idea of the diversity sampled in this dataset.