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Hauptverfasser: Montanares, Alan Gerson Contreras, Valenzuela, Luis, Martí, Luis, Sanchez-Pi, Nayat
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00080
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author Montanares, Alan Gerson Contreras
Valenzuela, Luis
Martí, Luis
Sanchez-Pi, Nayat
author_facet Montanares, Alan Gerson Contreras
Valenzuela, Luis
Martí, Luis
Sanchez-Pi, Nayat
contents Marine plankton underpin aquatic food webs and play a key role in global CO2 sequestration, making reliable species identification critical for understanding ocean health and climate feedbacks. Existing classification models perform well on individual collections but fail to generalize across instruments and environments due to isolated training datasets and inconsistent labels. To address this, we introduce Planktonzilla-17M, a unified dataset consolidating publicly available plankton image collections spanning thirteen imaging systems. It comprises 17.4 million images with standardized taxonomy and geo-environmental metadata, including 3.74 million plankton images spanning over 602 taxonomic classes, of which 201 are identified at the species level, making it the largest and most comprehensive plankton image dataset to date. Using this large-scale dataset, we perform a controlled comparison between supervised and CLIP-style image--text training on a shared ViT backbone. We find that a supervised classifier matches or exceeds CLIP-style training when trained using taxonomic lineage as text. We further observe that BioCLIP and BioCLIP2 perform poorly on plankton in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Leveraging Planktonzilla-17M improves plankton classification performance, highlighting the limitations of current biological foundation models in marine imaging domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_00080
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Planktonzilla: Multimodal dataset and models for understanding plankton ecosystems
Montanares, Alan Gerson Contreras
Valenzuela, Luis
Martí, Luis
Sanchez-Pi, Nayat
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Marine plankton underpin aquatic food webs and play a key role in global CO2 sequestration, making reliable species identification critical for understanding ocean health and climate feedbacks. Existing classification models perform well on individual collections but fail to generalize across instruments and environments due to isolated training datasets and inconsistent labels. To address this, we introduce Planktonzilla-17M, a unified dataset consolidating publicly available plankton image collections spanning thirteen imaging systems. It comprises 17.4 million images with standardized taxonomy and geo-environmental metadata, including 3.74 million plankton images spanning over 602 taxonomic classes, of which 201 are identified at the species level, making it the largest and most comprehensive plankton image dataset to date. Using this large-scale dataset, we perform a controlled comparison between supervised and CLIP-style image--text training on a shared ViT backbone. We find that a supervised classifier matches or exceeds CLIP-style training when trained using taxonomic lineage as text. We further observe that BioCLIP and BioCLIP2 perform poorly on plankton in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Leveraging Planktonzilla-17M improves plankton classification performance, highlighting the limitations of current biological foundation models in marine imaging domains.
title Planktonzilla: Multimodal dataset and models for understanding plankton ecosystems
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00080