Templates

Below are two suggested formats for recording smear slide analysis results. The forms help to remind you to make the same suite of observations on each slide so that your data are most useful. What observations you make depends on the questions you're asking, and you should set up your own template (both of these forms can be edited) to include the components present in your lake and the other information you find important (e.g., grain size distribution, diatom preservation), because both the research question and the composition of the sediment are highly variable from project to project.

If you don't force yourself to make the same observations on each slide, you may look back on your data and find notes such as "TONS of diatoms" or "calcite is corroded" on some slides but no notes about the abundance or appearance of these components on other slides. This inconsistency makes it hard to use smear slides to develop a (semi)quantitative lithological profile of your core, or to recognize anomalies and patterns.

Smear Slide Form.pdf is based upon an ODP-type description sheet, and designed to record one slide's information on one sheet. It is editable using Adobe Illustrator.

Smear Slide Table.xls is a more economical version of the same form; it is provided here with example data. When deleting the example data in Excel, leave column A as it is: it sums the row's percentages of components.