WCO L4 Annotated IFCB Training Library - Western English Channel, UK

This dataset contains a manually annotated Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) training library generated from water samples collected between 2023 and 2026 at Station L4 in the Western English Channel, UK. Station L4 forms part of Plymouth Marine Laboratory’s long-term plankton monitoring programme within the Western Channel Observatory (www.westernchannelobservatory.org), a well-established marine biodiversity reference site. Expertly-labelled IFCB images of plankton between 5 - 150µm in size have been collated to support the development and validation of automated image classification approaches (Clark et al 2025) and form part of the UK's Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)-funded project DEAL: DEcentrAlised Learning for automated image analysis and biodiversity monitoring.