ARMS-MBON is a European Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON) of Autonomous Reef Monitoring Structures (ARMS).
In ARMS-MBON we use ARMS units to sample the biodiversity of European coastal hard-bottom environments. Our ARMS units are placed for months at a time in the vicinity of marine stations, ports, marinas, and long-term ecological research sites distributed over Europe and the polar regions. They are populated by the surrounding hard-bottom communities, and once the units are retrieved, the organisms that colonised them are sampled and analysed. The aim of ARMS-MBON is to assess the status of, and changes in, the hard-bottom communities of these near-coast environments, using DNA (metabarcoding), image, and visual inspection methods.
ARMS-MBON started in 2018 as part of ASSEMBLE PLUS (Horizon project nr 730984), and from 2023 it continues as part of EMBRC's EMO BON project. The (now-frozen) ARMS-MBON page on the ASSEMBLE Plus site can be found here; that will be replaced with a new page in due course.
In ARMS-MBON, we use ENA to archive our raw sequences, PlutoF for sampling event metadata and images, an ARMS spreadsheet (a google sheet) for overview metadata and ENA accession numbers, and we run our bioinformatics analysis with PEMA. At regular intervals we upload all the metadata from PlutoF and the ARMS spreadsheet, and the outputs from PEMA, to our ARMS-MBON GitHub site. These are then quality controlled, semantically annotated, combined, and made openly accessible. The scripts and intermediate products arising from the quality control and combining processes are also available via GH.
This data landing page gives you access to these data and more. Use the main menu to go to
For any questions, you can contact the Team.
A short word about our data packages. We use RO-Crates to package our data files so that they are linked, described, and semantically annotated; every GH repository is a single RO-Crate. This Research Object approach is fundamental to making our data FAIR. Users can browse ARMS-MBON data below by selecting the direct GH links (the GH icon) or the RO-Crate viewer links (the package icon).