A unified template for sediment source fingerprinting databases

Over the last few years, the sediment source fingerprinting community has been engaged in promoting best practices to improve the design and the implementation of sediment fingerprinting techniques (Evrard et al., 2022). Data sharing is a key part of open science making research more reliable and accessible to the community. To move forward and improve data sharing, we propose these templates for databases and metadata. These templates include: common metadata for samples (soil, river flood deposit, sediment core...) description (name, IGSN, location, sampling date...), list and description of common properties (elemental geochemistry, organic matter, radionuclides…) used in sediment source fingerprinting studies. These templates are intended to evolve thanks to the participation of the community, as part of a collaborative project. In addition, the collectionneur R package was designed to help researchers and data managers maintain an up-to-date and well-organized database. is avalaible on GitHub (https://github.com/tchalauxclergue/collectionneur) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15146958). It facilitates the comparison and integration of new data entries into an existing database while keeping a detailed report of all modifications. All database formats are allowed, although it was initially designed for sediment source fingerprinting databases. Published databases following these templates are listed in the References section below.