The Laboratory for the Protection of Functional Biodiversity in Forest Ecosystems of CREA DC has published on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) the data on protected insects collected as part of the LIFE MIPP and InNat participatory science projects, initiatives that since 2014 have involved volunteers in reporting the presence of beetles, butterflies, dragonflies and crickets protected at an international level by the Habitats Directive.These records were organized into a dataset including all reports and then uploaded to GBIF .
This is almost 6,000 presence data , each of them validated by experts and coming from all over Italy.
GBIF is an international network and data infrastructure funded by several international governments and aimed at providing anyone, everywhere, open access to data on all life on Earth.
The GBIF network provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards, best practices, and open-source tools that enable them to share information about where and when species were recorded.
The network brings together these different data sources and makes them interoperable through the use of a standard vocabulary for describing and organizing biodiversity data, the Darwin Core, which, specifically, forms the basis of GBIF itself.
In this international context, unfortunately Italy has always remained slightly on the sidelines, not joining the GBIF partnership, unlike most European countries.
However, CREA has been recognized as a “data publisher”. The publication of this dataset on GBIF, the first case for CREA, opens the way to open science . (Source: https://www.crea.gov.it/ )