Guidelines for completing the ADVANCE metadata form: a FAIR enabling resource for biodiversity monitoring data

Within the scope of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration, the ADVANCE project – Advanced metadata standards for biodiversity survey and monitoring data: supporting of research and conservation – aimed at supporting rich metadata generation with interoperable metadata standards and semantic artifacts that facilitate data access, integration and reuse across terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms. To this end, we revised, adapted and expanded existing metadata schemas, vocabularies and thesauri to build a FAIR metadata schema and a metadata entry form built on it for users to provide their metadata instances focused on biodiversity monitoring data. The schema is FAIR because it is both machine-interpretable and follows domain-relevant community standards. This report provides a general overview of the project results and instructions on how to access, re-use and complete the metadata form.