Awarding the Metabarcoding and Metagenomics Editors' Choice Award 2024

Metabarcoding and Metagenomics continues its annual tradition of recognising the year's most outstanding article, as chosen by the journal's editorial team.
Congratulations to Dr Katy Klymus et al. for "The MIEM guidelines: Minimum information for reporting of environmental metabarcoding data," this year's winning article. Dr Katy Klymus has been awarded a voucher for a free publication in MBMG.
"For the 2024 Editor’s Award, we selected a paper that does not present cutting-edge research, but rather one highly important one that maximises use of data that is being produced, published in metabarcoding studies.
"The study addresses critical challenges for biodiversity monitoring using metabarcoding by providing a framework for the standardisation, reproducibility, and compatibility of eDNA studies. By adhering to FAIR principles, the guidelines provide a framework for more consistent reporting on sampling methodology, laboratory analysis, and bioinformatics workflows.
"What makes this study and its goal of maximizing comparability most timely is the vast amount of metabarcoding data that is being produced and the need to align these with major biodiversity data repositories such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), fostering global efforts in environmental conservation. Outside of the research community, such standards will allow policymakers and conservationists to leverage standardized and transparent data for informed decision-making, bridging the gap between research and actionable conservation strategies."
- Prof Dr Florian Leese (Editor-in-Chief), Dr Dirk Steinke (Deputy Editor-in-Chief) and Dr Alexander M. Weigand (Liaison editor).
Article citation
Klymus KE, Baker JD, Abbott CL, Brown RJ, Craine JM, Gold Z, Hunter ME, Johnson MD, Jones DN, Jungbluth MJ, Jungbluth SP, Lor Y, Maloy AP, Merkes CM, Noble R, Patin NV, Sepulveda AJ, Spear SF, Steele JA, Takahashi M, Watts AW, Theroux S (2024) The MIEM guidelines: Minimum information for reporting of environmental metabarcoding data. Metabarcoding and Metagenomics 8: e128689. https://doi.org/10.3897/mbmg.8.128689