Machine learning algorithms accurately identify free-living marine nematode species.

Background: Identifying species, particularly small metazoans, remains a daunting challenge and the phylum Nematoda is no exception. Typically, nematode species are differentiated based on morphometry and the presence or absence of certain characters. However, recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly machine learning (ML) algorithms, offer promising solutions for automating species identification, mostly in taxonomically complex groups.