Squidle+: a collaborative platform to manage, discover and annotate marine imagery

The rapid growth of marine imaging has outpaced our ability to efficiently analyse the imagery, creating challenges in data management, collaboration, and standardisation. This paper presents Squidle+, a web-based, collaborative platform for the end-to-end management, delivery, discovery, and annotation of marine imagery. Squidle+ provides a centralised portal and annotation repository while linking to imagery hosted on pre-existing cloud storage, eliminating data transfer and duplication. The system features a user-friendly interface with map-based exploration tools, advanced annotation workflows, and integrated analytics through a comprehensive API back-end. Collaboration is managed through user groups with granular permissions, while integrated QA/QC tools enable cross-validation between human annotators and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. A key innovation is a framework to translate between multiple standardised or user-defined annotation vocabularies. This gives users the flexibility to construct data sets that target specific scientific questions and facilitates data reuse, cross-project syntheses, large-scale ML training, and broad summaries that can be fed into national-level reporting. Squidle+ has been developed in close collaboration with an active user community and currently contains datasets from several platforms and operators around the world. It is currently the largest known repository of openly accessible georeferenced marine images with associated annotations. Squidle+ streamlines complex workflows and significantly enhances the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) of marine image data.