D2.3 EcoTaxa data service

The objective of Blue Cloud is to federate access to some data services at EU level, to ease discovery and enable cross-discipline work. The data access and discovery service covers the following infrastructures:

• EuroArgo: profiles of physics and biogeochemistry
• ICOS: carbonate system records
• Copernicus Marine Service: gridded fields of physics, biogeochemistry
• SeaDataNet: local samples of physics, chemistry, etc.
• EMODnet: local samples of bathymetry, chemistry, geology, physics, etc.
• EurOBIS: occurrences of biological organisms
• EuroBioImaging: microscopy images of cells
• ENA: nucleotide sequences of biological organisms

These services cover the marine environment in its different dimensions (physics, chemistry, biogeochemistry), the biology of the organisms that live it in but the information of direct ecological relevance (e.g. composition of biological communities) is limited to EurOBIS (and some of the biology section of EMODnet).

EcoTaxa provides more information in this respect: it contains occurrences of individual organisms, morphological information about them in the form of images, and can summarise those to provide ecological data tables that can be used to assess the composition of biological communities. It is focused on plankton, which is a good complement to EurOBIS/EMODnet Biology which contain more information on benthic and/or more visible organisms.

The development of EcoTaxa is still very active, given that the service is quite recent, and funded by several projects concurrently. The activities in specific relation with and funded by Blue Cloud are (i) the development of some API endpoints in EcoTaxa that align with the needs of the Blue Cloud data access and discovery service, (ii) the support of Blue Cloud collaborators during the development of the interface between this API and the Blue Cloud data access and discovery service. The data pipeline hence setup will be used by Blue Cloud's demonstrators.