Data Standards and Practices for Taxon-Resolved Phytoplankton Observations

There is a critical need for high quality sea-truth data sets to aid in development and evaluation of satellite-derived ocean color products. Over the last 10 years, the number of satellite algorithms for deriving phytoplankton functional types (PFTs) and size classes (PSCs) has grown dramatically, as has the demand for such products for applications from assessing climate change impacts on marine ecosystems to understanding mechanisms that regulate global biogeochemical cycles. Space agencies, including but not limited to NASA, NOAA, and EUMETSAT, require archives of high quality in situ environmental, optical, and phytoplankton properties for algorithm development and product validation. NASA’s SeaBASS system is a leading example of such a community resource (http://seabass.gsfc.nasa.gov/). These multiuser, publicly available data reservoirs are routinely utilized in hypothesis-based research, as well as for model parameterization and validation. To date, SeaBASS archived phytoplankton properties have been almost exclusively limited to pigment concentrations and absorption coefficients. New algorithms and applications increasingly require more detailed information about phytoplankton taxa or functional types. Concurrent with increasing demand for this kind of information, there have been technological advances in phytoplankton detection from microscopy to conventional flow cytometry and, most recently, automated imaging-in-flow cytometry. With these new observational tools producing datasets that can have high spatial, temporal, and taxonomic resolution, there is an imperative for informatics solutions to ensure the resulting data provide the most value to the most users, not only for current demands, but also for whatever needs emerge in the future. Our goal is to develop a set of recommended data standards and practices for phytoplankton taxonomic data, which currently do not exist. In doing so, we will maximize the potential for these data to contribute to satellite PFT algorithm development and validation, to advance ocean ecosystem models, and to enable more informed assessments and predictions of climate impacts on ocean biogeochemistry. We propose to convene a small working group (12 participants) at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in mid-2017. This group will identify standards and practices that are flexible enough to be applied not only to SeaBASS but also to any public archive. To these ends, we will invite a diverse group of participants including phytoplankton ecology and taxonomy experts, data scientists, and data resource managers for targeted discussions pertaining to this topic. The group will be asked to compile specific actionable recommendations. In addition to enabling access to phytoplankton products (e.g., taxon-resolved cell counts, biomass, and size distributions), the group will also address how to provide provenance that allows tracing data products back to raw data, including documentation of data processing steps. This provenance information could include records in standard provenance representations (e.g., Prov-O), but could also extend to public code repositories hosting reproducible workflows (e.g., Jupyter notebooks). By developing a set of common practices around provenance for phytoplankton taxonomic data, we will enable users of the data to (a) make informed decisions about which products can be integrated or compared across datasets, instruments, etc.; and (b) reproduce or reprocess products to