EcoTaxoGuide is a collaborative tool designed to support EcoTaxa users in the taxonomic classification of images captured by various imaging instruments. It provides clear guidance for distinguishing morphologically similar organisms, helping to ensure consistency and accuracy in classification across laboratories, taxonomic experts, and EcoTaxa projects.

EcoTaxoGuide offers tools for collaboratively creating and publishing instrument-specific classification guides, all built on the WORMS unified taxonomy for living objects. These are directly accessible within EcoTaxa, allowing users to easily access relevant taxonomic sheets and get all useful information for classifying their images.

All individual published sheets are publicly available and can be downloaded as PDFs for offline reference.

If the taxon/instrument sheet you’re looking for doesn’t exist, you can register and create one yourself. You may also request permission to contribute to an existing sheet. We warmly invite you to become part of this collaborative effort.

At the Plateforme d’Imagerie Quantitative (PIQv) and the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche (LOV), we have initiated a systematic effort to document taxa observed with ZooScan, FlowCamMicro/PlanktoScope, and UVP instruments, as we process millions of images each year.

The guides published by PIQv and LOV are available on Zenodo at the following links:

• Taxonomic guide for the annotation of Zooscan images

• Taxonomic guide for the annotation of FlowCam and PlanktoScope images

• Taxonomic guide for the annotation of Underwater Vision Profiler images