PSSdb-Merged: A Pelagic Size Structure database merged product to support biogeochemical modeling: First release of Merged products

This dataset represents the first release of merged 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).

Merged products correspond to the most complete datasets in PSSdb, whereby all instrument-specific datasets are merged together to produce a single, quasi-continuous size spectrum where only optimal values in overlapping size classes are selected for each spatio-temporal bin. The resulting spectra are produced after generating the taxa-specific products following the recent approach of Soviadan et al. (2023). Briefly, this approach assumes that one device is best suited in detecting certain taxa (amongst the living functional groups, see documentation), and size classes (depending on the resolution of the camera). As a result, we consider the maximum observed normalized biovolume/biomass and abundance amongst a set of non-null values from different instruments as the optimal measure for detection.

Links to the PSSdb code (including the taxonomic and allometric look-up tables) and documentation are available on the PSSdb webpage (https://pssdb.net).

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