Outline of the proposed intercalibration experiments: A. Pre-extraction: Each lab will process one standard WFD macroinvertebrate sample to send to the other four labs. Each lab will work with five fixative samples and five blended bulk samples, four of which are unknown. Each lab will run their custom lab and bioinformatic pipelines and an agreed standard pipeline for the extraction and downstream analysis. B. Post-extraction: Each lab will create one macroinvertebrate bulk DNA mock sample to send to the other four labs, thus each lab will work with five mock community samples, four of which are unknown to analyse. Each lab will run their custom lab and bioinformatic pipelines and an agreed standard pipeline.

 
 
  Part of: Blackman RC, Mächler E, Altermatt F, Arnold A, Beja P, Boets P, Egeter B, Elbrecht V, Filipe AF, Jones JI, Macher J, Majaneva M, Martins FMS, Múrria C, Meissner K, Pawlowski J, Schmidt Yáñez PL, Zizka VMA, Leese F, Price B, Deiner K (2019) Advancing the use of molecular methods for routine freshwater macroinvertebrate biomonitoring – the need for calibration experiments. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics 3: e34735. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.3.34735