Standardized Guidelines for Reporting Plasmodial Slime Moulds (Myxomycetes) from Field Surveys and Moist Chamber Cultures

Abstract Comparative syntheses of myxomycete inventories are often limited by inconsistent definitions of sampling units, incomplete substrate metadata, and unclear handling of sampling units with no detections, particularly in legacy datasets derived from opportunistic collecting. In addition, field observations of sporocarps and moist-chamber incubations represent methodologically distinct evidence streams and should be reported in a way that keeps them explicitly distinguishable. Here, we introduce a minimal, standardised reporting framework that follows a sampling-event structure widely used in biodiversity informatics. All sampling units are documented as events, including those yielding no detections (recorded as non-detections rather than confirmed absences), and each taxon detection is recorded as an occurrence linked to its event through a persistent identifier. For moist-chamber inventories, spatial and temporal metadata refer to the field collection of the substrate, complemented by event-level descriptors of laboratory handling and incubation conditions. This compact template supports transparent data publication and improves cross-study comparability without requiring specialised familiarity with Darwin Core.