PSSdb-Taxa: A Pelagic Size Structure database taxa-specific product to support biogeochemical modeling: Update to first release of taxa-specific products

This dataset represents the first update to the first release of taxa-specific products from the Pelagic Size Structure database (PSSdb, https://pssdb.net), a scientific project investigating the global particle size distributions measured from multiple pelagic imaging systems. These devices include the Imaging Flow Cytobot (Olson and Sosik 2007), benchtop scanners like the ZooScan (Gorsky et al. 2010), and the Underwater Vision Profiler (Picheral et al. 2010). The data sources originate from Ecotaxa (https://ecotaxa.obs-vlfr.fr/), Ecopart (https://ecopart.obs-vlfr.fr/), and Imaging FlowCytobot dashboards (https://ifcb.caloos.org/dashboard and https://ifcb-data.whoi.edu/dashboard).

Taxa-specific products were generated after standardization of the automated or manual taxonomic annotations assigned to individual particles following the recent guidelines of Neeley et al. (2021). We used the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS, https://www.marinespecies.org/)  to assign each particle its final taxonomic annotation, and published group-specific relationships linking biovolume to carbon biomass or dry weight.

The herein taxa-specific products include both taxonomic class-specific data, obtained after grouping all particles in a given taxonomic class§, and broad plankton functional type (PFT) dataƗ. Detrital materials were also separated based on common categories (marine snow, aggregate, fecal pellet) and known biovolume-to-biomass conversion factors (Durkin et al. 2021). Links to the PSSdb code (including the taxonomic and allometric look-up tables) and documentation are available on the PSSdb webpage (https://pssdb.net).

This updated version includes the following changes (modified in April, 2024):

●     An error in the size classes defined in the ecopart_size_bins.tsv used by the script generating taxa-specific products (scripts/5_compute_taxa_NBSS.py) was corrected, the size ratio between consecutive size bins is the same across all the size range.

 For additional information, please see the PDF documentation available below ...