Assessing habitats vulnerability - a macroecological approach within the LifeWatch Italy "Alien Species Show Case"

Environmental Science is undergoing a period of big changes facing the challenge of data collection in an era driven by data. A big amount of data is pivotal when upscaling the study of ecological processes to the macro-ecological level, investigating multiple species distributed in multiple habitats. LifeWatch (LW), the European e-Science infrastructure on biodiversity and ecosystems, aims to strength the scientific research on biodiversity through the sharing biodiversity data making them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. According to this scenario, the LW Mediterranean Thematic Centre (MTC), together with the other TCs and the ICT members, developed a first case study collecting biodiversity data to investigate the vulnerability of ecosystems to biological invasions. The main scope of the Alien Species Show Case was assessing fragility of EUNIS habitat types to alien and invasive species and modelling their fragility to abiotic forcing. Occurrence records were gathered from specific datasets belonging to more than 30 public and private research institution. Overall a dataset on the occurrence of more than 12000 species from 560 sites (lagoon, marine, freshwater and terrestrial) across the Italian peninsula, was gathered. Records were organized and enriched with additional information to be useful to the further analysis. The data validation has been made through the data cleaning semi-automatic service in the LW dataportal, based on the lifewatch-ita Global Name Architecture, which refers to PESI, Worms, and COL. Here we report the steps that led to the show case development and the related results obtained, in terms of published scientific papers.