Table 2.

A proposal for unified cost criteria to be used in the cost-efficiency assessments of novel monitoring methods

Cost factor	Definition
Type I: Price of data	Price of data if bought from third parties
Type II: Equipment and supplies	Cost of equipment, cost of expendable supplies per sample
Type III: Personnel	Personnel costs needed to process one sample or a study site
Type IV: Time	Time spent on sampling and data management
Type V: Other costs	E.g., transport of samples, training the personnel and keeping up their proficiency, maintaining a website for citizen science observations
Type VI: Savings	Savings gained by replacing an existing method Required analysis: worktime (% compared with the present method), required skills (compared with the present method) and total costs (compared with the present method)