"Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata standard developed by and for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and others, including the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity.... EML is a set of XML schema documents that allow for the structural expression of metadata. It was developed specifically to allow researchers to document a typical data set in the ecological sciences."
The data spice package in R (https://github.com/ropensci/dataspice) encodes to Ecological Metadata Language' standard.
"Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata standard developed by and for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and others, including the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity.... EML is a set of XML schema documents that allow for the structural expression of metadata. It was developed specifically to allow researchers to document a typical data set in the ecological sciences."