Best practice manuals and templates

 Best practice manuals and templates

About this page
On this page we present a collection of best practice manuals & submission templates for data submissions to PANGAEA. We provide a general field observation template and a series of guides for specific research areas in order to best capture and preserve the particular contextual information of these research areas for reuse, and to best assist our authors in compiling this helpful and necessary information. The guides also include the corresponding adapted templates to help our authors submit their data.

The templates support the comprehensive compilation of required meta-information related to sampling, methodology, and measured parameters/variables in a well-defined, structured manner. They help to to be compliant with our guidelines and requirements, standardize metadata and data in submissions and thus also assist PANGAEA in the process of reviewing and ingesting data submissions, which in turn considerably contributes to a reduction in overall submission processing time.

General field observation studies from earth and environmental sciences
We recommend the following template for authors wishing to submit data for studies that do not fall within the more specific research areas listed below. [[Media:Envir sample template.xlsx|Generic spreadsheet template for field observation data]] (xlsx-file including detailed instructions)

[[Media:Envir sample template tsv.zip|Generic text-file template for field observation data]] (zipped tab separated text files. Please see instruction file 0_README.md first!)

Specific research domains
Biological data Chemical data Geological data

Geophysical data


 * Multibeam echosounder data (incl. SVP, MBES water column data) & Side-scan sonar data & bathymetry model data (Bathymetry)


 * Sediment echosounder data (e.g. Atlas Parasound P70 echosounder data) (Sediment_echosounder)

Meteorological data

Eddy-Covariance-Measurement Systems

Oceanography data


 * ADCP Underway Data
 * Bio-optical Sensors Underway Data
 * CTD Data
 * CTD Underway Data
 * Ferrybox Underway Data
 * TSG Underway Data

Binary objects
This category of data publications includes georeferenced binary object, e.g. NetCDF-files, seismic data files (e.g. segy), photos/images or videos.
 * Binary objects