English guidelines
Welcome!
Protocols increase the quality of fieldwork and labwork and thus the quality of scientific research, which must be transparent, traceable and applicable. They help make field- and labwork more harmonized and more repeatable, reproducible and comparable. Standardization is also interesting for the Institute for Nature and Forest Research (INBO) from an efficiency point of view.
This site serves as a repository for the latest versions of approved, publicly available protocols used at the INBO. Each protocol can either be accessed online through this website (html version) or a PDF version can be downloaded. On the left side you will find the navigation to the different sections. In the NEWS section you can find which (versions of) protocols were added when.
This website contains the published protocols. The management, maintenance, approval and revision of the source files underlying these published protocols is done in the inbo/protocolsource GitHub repository.
Five types of protocols
We distinguish five types of standard protocols.
The first type is the standard field protocol (sfp) which is used to explain the steps that are needed in the field by a field worker to execute a specific field activity.
The second type is the standard instrument protocol (sip) which explains the use and maintenance of instruments.
The third type is the standard analytical protocol (sap) which is used in the laboratory or the field to explain a particular lab or field-analytical procedure involving physical or chemical measurements.
The fourth type stands for standard operating procedure (sop) and is for everything that does not fit in one of the previous types.
The fifth type is a category reserved for project-specific protocols (spp).
The latter is more of a convenience to aid quick development and employment of protocols within a project context.
Within the scope of a project, it might sometimes be necessary to re-use a sfp type protocol but with slightly different settings which are specific to the project.
This can be done by including a published sfp protocol as an spp subprotocol where the deviations from the default settings are given.
Protocol identification
The previously explained typology of protocols is further detailed in a so-called protocol-code. A protocol-code consists of a prefix referring to the protocol-type (three characters), a protocol-number (three digits) and a language tag (two characters), all separated by a hyphen.
| type | theme | theme_number | protocol-code |
|---|---|---|---|
| field | generic | 0 | sfp-0##-en |
| field | water | 1 | sfp-1##-en |
| field | air | 2 | sfp-2##-en |
| field | soil | 3 | sfp-3##-en |
| field | vegetation | 4 | sfp-4##-en |
| field | species | 5 | sfp-5##-en |
| instrument | sip-###-en | ||
| operating | sop-###-en | ||
| analysis | sap-###-en | ||
| project | spp-###-en |
Field protocols are further subdivided into 5 themes, which indicates broadly which environmental or biological aspect is targeted by the protocol.
In case of thematic protocols, the first digit of the protocol-number corresponds with the theme-number.
The ## indicates an incremental number.
For instance, the first field protocol for “theme water” will have protocol code sfp-101-en.
The s*p-### part of the protocol code can be thought of as a code that corresponds one-to-one with the title of the protocol (when ignoring language).
The final two characters identify the language the protocol is written in.
This can be either Dutch (nl) or English (en).
A same protocol but written in a different language, will have the same protocol code safe for the final two characters.
Each protocol thus has a unique protocol-code, but there can be multiple versions of a protocol.
To discriminate between different versions of protocol, we need a version number.
The version number that we use is of the form YYYY.NN.
YYYY indicates the year in which the version of the protocol was released.
The NN is a number that indicates the order of release within that year (starting with 01).
The version number will therefore uniquely identify a specific version of a specific protocol, which can be refered to without the need to refer to the protocol-code.
Here’s a fictive example:
- version
2022.01(identifies a first version ofsfp-401-en) - version
2022.02(identifies a first version ofsfp-001-en) - version
2022.03(identifies a second version ofsfp-401-en)
The NEWS page lists the version numbers (in descending chronological order) and identifies which protocols they belong to. The website also has an overview table per protocol type, which lists all versions of protocols that belong to that type. These tables can be filtered by protocol code. This can be used to easily get an overview of all versions of a protocol.
