The BEFdata portal allows to import research data directly from an Excel 2003 workbook. To get most out of the workbook, it's good to know that the "General Metadata" sheet saves dataset ownership, as well as general information of where, how, and why data was sampled. The data can belong to a project and will then be displayed on this project's data set list. It can belong to members of the portal, then these will be asked if someone requests this file for analysis.

Describe, what was the design of your campaign. How many objects in what groups did you sample? Did you sample along gradients like diversity or successional age? Did you place your samples randomly, selected trees at random or in a stratified random design?

This is for the location where all the data comes from

Often, date is not provided in the data itself. So here you can describe when the data was derived. This applies to analysis performed with your data. So individual height of a tree will change from year to year, so it is good to know, when the measurement was taken.

You can list your organism taxa or state that no organisms were used. You can also specify the column in raw data where the organisms are named.

Are there circumstances that explain the precision of your measurements? Could it be that a sandstorm destroyed part of the plots in a given year?

Here you can tell the reader, which columns were the response and which columns in the raw data were explanatory variables. You can also indicate, what the main response means in term of ecosystem functioning. The main response column may be the abundance of tree species, the size of trees derived from dbh and height, or the kinetic energy of raindrops passing through forest canopy.