Dear CytoBuoy users,
On behalf of the project leads of AqQua Project we ask your attention for the following.
They would like to invite you to participate in the AqQua Project, a large-scale collaborative endeavor to
Build an AI foundation model of plankton image data,
Release it as an open-source tool for the global community for the purpose of facilitating everyone’s plankton-related research, and
Leverage it to develop global plankton- and particle distribution models and estimate related process rates.
To achieve this, the AqQua project is currently collecting plankton image datasets from a variety of imaging devices deployed across diverse aquatic habitats worldwide. To assemble a most diverse and extensive dataset, we encourage scientists around the world to share their plankton- and particle image data.
We are very happy that we have already received overwhelming signals of support, with more than 40 academic labs and non-academic stakeholders across the globe pledging to share data and contribute expertise.
Everyone sharing data will be included as author of a planned data paper.
Furthermore, everyone sharing data will be invited to actively contribute to a respective foundation model paper, as well as global distribution- and process rate papers. We therefore reach out to you, even if your data is already in the public domain. The AqQua foundation model will, most likely, perform favorably on the kinds of data it has been trained on, thus your research might benefit from sharing your data in the long-run. The AqQua project will not analyze any provided dataset in isolation nor perform any respective local analyses.
Due to our full commitment to Open Science, all data shared with the AqQua project needs to come with permission to be made publicly available on July 15, 2027 under CC BY-NC 4.0 license as part of our planned data paper. Thus we are exclusively seeking data that is either already publicly available or can be made publicly available no later than July 15, 2027.
As foundation model training will commence this fall, the deadline for sharing data with AqQua is July 31, 2025.
To participate, please read and fill our data sharing form.
The form will allow you to specify which data you are providing, under which license or agreement, and by which technical means the data sharing will be done.
More information about AqQua is available on our project page. Should you have any questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact us at aqqua@geomar.de. We would be stoked to have you on board!
Rainer Kiko on behalf of the AqQua team
Project leads: Rainer Kiko, Dagmar Kainmueller, Klas Ove Möller, Timo Dickscheid
P.s.: If you host images on EcoTaxa, we obtained your contact details from the public project owner listing on EcoTaxa. We are now reaching out to you to ask if you would like to share specific datasets hosted on EcoTaxa with us. Our project is supported by colleagues at the Laboratoire d'Océanographie de Villefranche, but they are not project members. The AqQua project will not scrape all of EcoTaxa for any images but will only use data that has been explicitly shared with us. To enable data transfer from EcoTaxa to us, it would be easiest if you provided “view” access to the EcoTaxa user “AqQua” (aqqua@geomar.de). We will then be able to download the data via the EcoTaxa API. Once the data download has been completed, we will inform you so that you can make corrections or revoke the permission, if you wish. Only Rainer Kiko (rkiko@geomar.de), as project lead, and Martin Schröder (mschroeder@geomar.de), as data manager, have access to the aqqua@geomar.de user. You are welcome to use our Python scripts (https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/aqqua-public/ecotaxa-tools) if you wish to change the access rights for multiple projects in bulk via the EcoTaxa API.