PHYTOBS

This is the file download section of the PHYTOBS National Observation Service.

The main entry point for the PHYTOBS project is at www.phytobs.fr.

In this download section, files are organized by release (e.g. 2021-01) and by sampling station. The most recent release is always available using the latest link.

In each station folder, it is possible to download files in two tabular formats:

• CSV files (.csv extension) where fields are separated with a semicolon (;). These files contain a single header line followed by a series of data lines.
• ODV files (.txt extension) where fields are separated with a tab character. These files contain a header with SeaDataNet compliant metadata, followed by a line with column headers and units, and a series of data lines.

Files with different contents are provided:

• Analyst files containing single taxon counts.
• Phytobs files containing single counts for taxon groups that are part of the SNO labelled taxon groups.
• combined files aggregating the two previous files.

Files are encoded with Unicode (UTF-8) character set, so this encoding should be selected when opening files in your spreadsheet application to ensure all characters are correctly displayed (see here for importing these files in Excel).

The annual import of data into the PHYTOBS-Network database involves a step of matching the analyst identification/taxa with the Phytobs labelled taxa or groups of taxa defined by the network's experts.
These taxa or groups of taxa labelled are provided to the import tools and described in the table in AAAA_PHYTOBS-labelled-taxa.csv (where AAAA is the analysis's year, the first time in 2025). Each line of this table defines the taxa or group of taxa (column 1) by giving them a name, a rank (column 2) and then the WORMS identifier(s) (Aphia_ID - marinespecies.org) that comprise them (column 3).
To find the labelling level for a given taxon: search for its Aphia_ID WORMS in column 3.

DATA USAGE/MODIFICATION/REDISTRIBUTION: All downloadable data on this web site is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.