Developing data standards on Version Control System platforms like GitHub enables collaboration and transparency.• Many standards do not use tools for collaboration: issue tracking, licensing, and automated website hosting (GitBook or GitHub Pages).• We make recommendations and provide templates for creating descriptive versioncontrolled data standard documentation on GitHub.

Research can be more transparent and collaborative by using Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles to publish Earth and environmental science data. Reporting formats—instructions, templates, and tools for consistently formatting data within a discipline—can help make data more accessible and reusable. However, the immense diversity of data types across Earth science disciplines makes development and adoption challenging. Here, we describe 11 community reporting formats for a diverse set of Earth science (meta)data including cross-domain metadata (dataset metadata, location metadata, sample metadata), file-formatting guidelines (file-level metadata, CSV files, terrestrial model data archiving), and domain-specific reporting formats for some biological, geochemical, and hydrological data (amplicon abundance tables, leaf-level gas exchange, soil respiration, water and sediment chemistry, sensor-based hydrologic measurements). More broadly, we provide guidelines that communities can use to create new (meta)data formats that integrate with their scientific workflows. Such reporting formats have the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and predictions by making it easier for data contributors to provide (meta)data that are more interoperable and reusable.

The Early Permian (Asselian) Mengkarang Formation of the western Jambi Province, Sumatra, is well exposed in the valley of the Merangin River. No consensus regarding the depositional environment of this section had been reached hitherto. This section preserves abundant evidence of a Permian forest, named the Merangin Fossil Forest herein, which grew at the foot of an active volcano, where pyroclastic flows often made way and destroyed the vegetation and where epiclastic reworked pyroclastics rapidly entombed the vegetation. The present assessment is based on a detailed study of three localities using multiple lines of evidence, including petrography, silica typing including hot cathodoluminescence microscopy and spectroscopy, and palynofacies analysis. In situ Agathoxylon was near enough to the volcanic slope to be buried rapidly, shallow enough to avoid extreme crystallization in the lumina, and far enough from the metamorphic centre not to get recrystallized. All these combined contingencies make this a most unique find that provides significant insights into a rarely studied palaeoecological setting from the Early Permian.

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