The Laboratory for the Protection of Functional Biodiversity in Forest Ecosystems of CREA DC has published data on protected insects collected as part of the participatory science projects LIFE MIPP and InNat on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). These initiatives have involved volunteers since 2014 in reporting the presence of beetles, butterflies, dragonflies, and crickets protected internationally by the Habitat Directive. These records have been organized into a dataset comprising all reports and have been uploaded to GBIF. They are now accessible and available for consultation by everyone: https://doi.org/10.15468/m5sfc6. This dataset includes nearly 6,000 presence records, each validated by experts and collected from across Italy.
GBIF is an international network and data infrastructure funded by various governments worldwide, aimed at providing open access to data about all forms of life on Earth to anyone, anywhere. The GBIF network provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards, best practices, and open-source tools that allow them to share information on where and when species have been recorded. The network brings together these diverse data sources and makes them interoperable through the use of a standard vocabulary for describing and organizing biodiversity data, the Darwin Core, which forms the foundation of GBIF itself. In this international context, unfortunately, Italy has always remained somewhat on the sidelines, not joining the GBIF partnership, unlike most European countries. However, CREA has been recognized as a “data publisher” and, therefore, “there are no more excuses”! In fact, the publication of this dataset on GBIF, the first case for CREA, paves the way for open science, hoping for the publication of the many datasets that, as researchers, we have kept aside for years.
