External resources

Ornitho.it is the information platform shared by Italian biologists, ornithologists and birdwatchers and by many national and regional ornithological associations devoted to bird study and conservation, birdwatching and related promotional activities. Some observations, especially the more recent ones, might still be pending validation. Ornitho.it is proving very useful for the work of compiling an atlas of birds nesting and overwintering in Italy. Since October 2014, the platform has also posted data on reptiles, amphibians (in agreement with the Italian Herpetological Society – SHI), dragonflies (in agreement with odonata.it) and terrestrial and marine mammals and bats (in agreement with the Italian Mammal Society – ATIt).

GBIF - Global Biodiversity Information Facility is an international network and data infrastructure receiving state funding in many countries. It aims to provide anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

The GBIF network is coordinated from its secretariat in Copenhagen and the countries and organisations involved operate through participant nodes. The network provides data-holding institutions around the world with common standards, good practices and open-source tools allowing sharing of information on where and when given species were observed. The data comes from a wide range of sources, from museum specimens collected in the 18th and 19th centuries to DNA barcodes and smartphone photos taken in recent days and weeks.

The network uses data standards to bring together these various data sources, including Darwin Core, which forms the basis for the bulk of GBIF.org’s index of hundreds of millions of species occurrence records. Publishers provide open access to their datasets using machine-readable Creative Commons licence designations. This allows scientists, researchers and others to use the data in an average of four peer-reviewed publications per day, as well as in other policy papers. These analyses cover topics ranging from the impacts of climate change and the spread of invasive and alien pests to priorities for conservation, food security and human health. And they would not be possible without the data provided by the GBIF network.

GBIF Italy contains the Italian national data of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the data infrastructure receiving state funding in many countries aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

iNaturalist is a platform for recording and organising of nature-related observations, meeting other enthusiasts and discovering the world of nature. The site encourages participation by nature enthusiasts of every kind, including hikers, birdwatchers, environmentalists, park rangers, beachgoers, mushroom pickers, hunters and anglers. By bringing together all of these different nature-related perspectives and skills, iNaturalist hopes to create a broad awareness local biodiversity and promote exploration of natural environments.

iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society.

DEIMS-SDR (Dynamic Ecological Information Management System - Site and dataset registry) is an infrastructure component serving the eLTER (European Long-Term Ecosystem Research) initiative. As an information management system powered by eLTER, DEIMS-SDR acts as a registry of eLTER sites
and also offers services to European colleagues and global user communities. It provides information on long-term ecosystem research sites around the world, on the data gathered by these sites and on the people and networks involved with them.
DEIMS-SDR describes a wide range of sites, providing a wealth of information, including each site’s location, ecosystems, facilities, the parameters measured and research topics. It also enables access to a growing number of datasets and data products associated with the sites.

Next Data is a national system for the retrieval, storage, access and diffusion of environmental and climate data from mountain and marine areas

Ecological population models need to be confirmed by comparing their modelling forecasts with long-term observations of changes in population size. This archive contains annual Alpine ibex (Capra ibex) censuses stretching back 45 years for the Gran Paradiso National park in northwest Italy. The ibex population grew from 3300 to almost 5000 in the 1980s, at a time when snowfalls began to diminish, then fell in the 1990s, essentially due to lower survival rates of ibex kids, which find their first winter particularly challenging.