AqQua The Aquatic Life Foundation Project: Quantifying Life at Scale in a Changing World

Poster
In session Postersession No. 1 , Sept. 3, 2025, 15:45 – 16:30
Exact timing: 15:45 – 16:30

Aquatic life is crucial for human well-being, playing a key role in carbon sequestration, climate regulation, biodiversity conservation and nutrition. Plankton are the basis of aquatic food webs and sustainably sequester vast amounts of carbon from the atmosphere to the ocean’s interior. Impacts of climate change and pollution on plankton functioning and diversity not only impact fish resources that play a major role in human nutrition, but also the efficiency of the biological carbon pump. The critical role of aquatic life in biogeochemical cycles, climate regulation, conservation of aquatic biodiversity and human nutrition mandates precise mapping and monitoring. Distributed pelagic imaging techniques enable comprehensive global observation, providing critical insights for decision-making and carbon dioxide removal strategies. To this end, each day, millions of images of plankton and particles are taken by researchers around the globe, using a variety of imaging systems. Each individual image and its associated metadata can provide crucial information not only about the individual organism or particle, but also on the biodiversity and functioning of aquatic food webs, ecosystem status of the related water body, and its role in carbon sequestration. The Aquatic Life Foundation Project will, for the first time, combine billions of images acquired with a variety of devices across the globe. We will leverage this dataset for large-scale training of a foundational pelagic imaging model, which we will fine-tune for the highly relevant down-stream tasks of species classification, trait extraction and particulate organic carbon estimation. We will exploit model predictions to establish global maps of species biodiversity, ecosystem status, and carbon flux at unprecedented accuracy and granularity, thereby generating