Plankton community ecology and ecosystem research is currently greatly hampered by the bottleneck of acquiring species-level information from the communities due to the slow analysis process with traditional microscopy methods. The FASTVISION consortium will combine front-line plankton imaging instrumentation and taxonomic expertise of the Finnish Environment Institute and the computer vision and image analysis excellence of the Lappeenranta University of Technology.
The project will use digitized microscopy images of plankton provided by novel automated imaging instruments, to train image recognition software for species identification using efficient machine learning approaches that produce interoperable data across instruments and habitats. This big data of plankton community composition with an unprecedented high resolution will be applied to experimental and field tests of key hypotheses in plankton community ecology, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.