The LifeWatch Italy Data Portal: from data sharing to analysis

Biodiversity and ecosystem research is becoming central to major societal challenges as bioeconomy and climate action. To handle the scale and complexity of the scientific question being addressed, there is a strong need to integrate scientific knowledge. However, relevant data are heterogeneous, distributed and difficult to share. Initiatives to integrate data into viable resources for innovation in science and decision-making are being developed as local, regional, and global initiatives.The Data Portal of the LifeWatch Italy (LW-ITA) e-infrastructure aims at facilitating data sharing and stimulating collaborative and data-intensive science in the fields of biodiversity and ecosystem research. LW-ITA Data Portal functionalities ease data management through the Data Life Cycle (quality assurance and quality control, metadata creation, integration, data discovery, visualization and analysis). We present the currently available solutions for data management and sketch future developments. We aim to create a service-oriented e-infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem data, where all components are accessible through web services, in order to provide one single entry point to existing biodiversity and ecosystem data resources in Italy and to make them findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable (FAIR principles) at all levels, from local to global.