ISA environmental reporting templates and data repository: insights from the ATLAS project

1. Environmental data are essential to understand and monitor the effects of deep-sea mining in the Area. Appropriate guidelines on data collection, storage and reporting facilitate the translation of environmental data into meaningful information for decision making. 2. Environmental data collected using standardized sampling protocols become easier to manage and transfer. Although the development of such standards over large areas of the deep-sea is a challenging task, efforts in this direction would be beneficial. 3. Reporting and storage schemes should capture the complexity and variety of environmental data. Flexible reporting and storage schemes may represent a better alternative than the actual generalised reporting templates. 4. Regardless of the reporting scheme, metadata about origin, spatial and temporal coverage, protocols, gears, sample types and quality have always to complement any type of environmental data. 5. External organizations, projects and databases may provide important hints and resources in building the ISA environmental data repository and in structuring data collection, storage and reporting processes. Cooperation is of paramount importance. 6. Data collection, data management and governance are all interrelated aspects that need to be considered at the same time in order to avoid a disarticulation between data accumulation, knowledge production and compliance with regulations. 7. In order to increase the utility of imagery data, future efforts should consider four aspects: appropriate spatial and temporal planning of video collection, automated image processing tools, standard practices in image annotations and regional image-base species catalogues providing permanent references for future studies