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Here you can find some information about naming convention and the recomended terminology that is used on ecRxiv.

Naming convention

All indicators are given a unique code:

CO_NAME_XXX

where

CO = two letter country code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2) indicator the country that the indicator applies to, or if it applies to multiple countries, the country of the main affiliation for the main author.

NAME= four letter code for the indicator group. Some indicators are unique, one of a kind. Others are clearly related. There are no definite rules for when two indicators beloing tot the same group, and there are no risk involved with treating two indicators are being in differetn groups when perhaps they shuold eb grouped. The indicator group is there only to ease the readability of the IDs and to group related indicators when sorting indicator list alphabetically. As a general rule, indicator groups are indicators developed by the same person or same group of indicator developers, and that relate to the same ecosystem characteristic. They may use different data, different methods, and concern different ecosystems, but they are in prinsiple trying to describe a similar aspect of the ecosystems. The letters are usually the first four letters of the full name, e.g. ALIE for indicators relating to alien species.

XXX = three digit number to distinguis indicators within the same group. If you are updating an existing indicator, i.e. creating an update that will replace the use of the existing version, then this should not affect the indicator ID, and it should not affect this number. Instead, different XXX can refer to alternative methodology for an indicator. If the same indicator is used more-or-less in the same way for two ecosystem types, XXX can also refer to ecosystem type.

Versioning

Each indicator (each unique indicator ID) will also have its own version number, where 000.001 denotes a dirst draft not ready for wide use, and 001.000 is used for the first operational version. The version number is not part of the indicator ID, and subsequent versions overwrite each other. Each versions fact sheets gets their of persistent URL and citation.

Recomended terminology

Term	Definition
Indicator	Short for ecocystem condition indicator. Defined as in SEEA EA as a normalised variable.
Variable	Short for ecosystem condition variable. Some quantitative data that describes a ecosystem characteristic. The variable can use any units (e.g. biophysical units).
Metric	A variable OR an indicator.
Ecosystem characteristic	Referes to some aspect of ecosystems that are included in the definition of the refernce condition (i.e. a citerion for describing good ecosystem condition).
Ecosystem condition	Defined as in SEEA EA: Ecosystem condition is the quality of an ecosystem measured in terms of its abiotic and biotic characteristics
Reference condition	As in SEEA EA: A reference condition is the condition against which past, present and future ecosystem condition is compared in order to measure relative change over time.
Reference levels	Variable values with corresponding indicator values. A special denotation of the type Xn is used, where n goes from 0 to 100 and refers to the corresponding indicator value (in percentage). E.g. X0 is the lower and X100 is the upper reference level. There can be any number of reference levels for each variable.
Threshold value	Referes to X60, denoting the class boarder between good and bad condition.
Scaling	Refers to a modification of variables where X0 is mapped to 0 and X100 is mapped to 1 on the indicator scale.
Truncating	Refers to mapping all variable values below X0 to 0 and all variable values above X100 to 1 on the indicator scale
Transforming	Refers to any modificatio of the default linear relationship between X0 and X100, such as piecewise linear transformation using additional reference levels.
Normalisation	Referes to the process for converting variables to indicators using one or severeal of scaling, truncattion, and transformation

Open Science badges

Individual indicator documentations are rewarded badges reflecting their conformity to open science practices. Two pillars of good practice are currently recognized here: data availability and code reproducibility. Finally, an overall open science badge shows the minimum badge or quality across these pillars.

Data availability

• GOLD - Data Integrated: data published alongside the indicator, or programmatically integrated in the workflow with a direct, unambiguous link with no barriers to access. Although not a requirement, data should ideally be FAIR, published in a trusted repository with a persistent identifier (e.g., DOI), in open, non-proprietary formats, and with rich metadata.

• SILVER - Data available via manual download: includes a reference to a public repository where the data is openly published with a persistent identifier.

• BRONSE - Data available upon request: data can be made available upon request, but may be in proprietary or aggregated format, and without unambiguous versioning.

• NONE - Data restricted or not available: data not available, under a restrictive license, or available only after payment.

Code reproducibility

To decide the code reproducibility one should assume the data availability is gold standard. Otherwise the code would not be executable.

• GOLD - Fully reproducible environment: The code is run in a fully reproducible environment (e.g. using Docker, Nix, Renv) and all calculations are scripted and executable within the .qmd file.

• SILVER - Documented and executable: All data handling and calculations are scripted and included in the .qmd file. Dependencies are clearly listed (e.g. by printing sessionInfo() in an R session).

• BRONZE - Partial code: At least parts of the data handling or calculations are documented elsewhere (and is references to), or the code that is provided is not sufficient for reproduction.

• NONE - Code not available: The documentation is limited to metadata, textual description and/or results.