AtlantECO Deliverable - D04.4 - Handbook of Standards and Best Practices

The present deliverable (D4.4) reports on AtlantECO’s Handbook of Standards and Best Practices. It was developed throughout the project, and its content is presented in three deliverables (D4.1, D4.2 & D4.4), which are all publicly accessible under a single DOI (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4897860) and also available via UNESCO’s Ocean Best Practices. AtlantECO generated new observations as part of the project’s sampling activities in synergy with other European and International projects (see deliverable D4.7). The Handbook provides a set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for methodologies used across these activities to study the Ocean microbiome. These SOPs also constitute a basis for comparing protocols and aggregating results from different observation programmes. The SOPs are generic and describe key methodological concepts, materials and procedural steps, which gives the different observation programmes enough flexibility to adopt the standards and best practices and adapt the SOPs to their specific context.