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Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) and Biological and Ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (BioEco EOVs) are two cooperative conceptual frameworks which help harmonize and process multi-source marine biodiversity observations into robust indexes, in order to measure progress toward policy conservation goals. Long-term monitoring networks are encouraged to contribute to these frameworks by mobilizing historical times series which are suitable for detecting impacts of management policies. In this paper, we identify specific recommendations for increasing reuse in the EV frameworks of the biodiversity historical data collected and maintained by the Gulf of Venice (GOV) site, i.e., the monitoring facility that is selected as case study in the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research network (LTER-Italy). The recommendations are obtained through a practical approach comprising two phases. In the first phase, a literature review helps extract the guidelines for implementing the principles representing the most recent attempt to unify management of EBV and BioEco EOV data, i.e., Benson’s tenets. In the second phase, we compare the guidelines to the data management practices enacted by the selected monitoring site in order to recommend curation interventions. The outputs of the analysis are discussed in order to verify if the approach and the recommendations are general enough to be replicated in the marine component of monitoring networks to coordinate the LTER data contribution to the EV frameworks.

The design and establishment of Marine Ecological Observatories (MEOs) are fostered at the European level. MEOs should adopt a holistic view, integrating and harmonizing long-term oceanographic and ecological research and monitoring, and increasing conservation strategies effectiveness according to the ecological connectivity concept. The data and knowledge collected and made available through MEOs should inform policies dealing with conservation and management of the marine environment. We present and discuss these issues in the Adriatic Sea context, where the transnational ecological observatory “ECOAdS” is under development in the framework of the Interreg Italy-Croatia project ECOSS (Observing System in the Adriatic Sea: oceanographic observations for biodiversity), which aims to support Natura 2000 network implementation and cross-border coordination of multiple monitoring initiatives. We analyse the main EU directives that deal with marine conservation, notably the Habitats and Birds directives, the Water Framework Directive, and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive, as they are the primary instruments that can guide the development of the observatory while strengthening cooperation at the basin scale. We bring out the synergies and discrepancies among these legal instruments, and build on them ECOAdS as a monitoring platform that may respond and contribute to their requirements, boosting the synergies and overcoming the weaknesses. Finally, we provide some hints for the further development of this transnational MEO as a collector of the existing monitoring efforts aimed at harmonizing their approaches and incorporating the ecological connectivity to foster an ecosystem-based approach to conservation management.

This work presents a practical case study of the Open Science principles applied to the valorization of a long-term marine dataset collected in the Northern Adriatic Sea, one of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites of the LTER-Italy network. The dataset covers a temporal range of 50 years (1965–2015), and it is composed of abiotic, and phyto- and zooplankton data, for a total of 21 parameters. The case study involved many actions, which will be described here, distinguishing between the ones affecting the whole research project workflow and those acting more specifically on the dataset. We evaluate strengths, weaknesses, and possible improvements for each action. The present study pointed out that, despite the initial and still some remaining mistrust, opening research projects is more than a best practice. It is (i) important because it improves research transparency (increasing researchers’ credibility, replicability of science, and products reuse), (ii) required by many international initiatives and regulations, and (iii) enriching because it encourages cooperation between scientists across different fields and laboratories.

Precision Agriculture (PA) takes advantage of digital technologies to improve agricultural production and its economic and environmental sustainability. The main issues in the implementation and spread of PA include (a) harmonization and (b) interpretation of heterogeneous data collected from different sources; (c) interoperability of systems and data; (d) implementation of new algorithms and methodologies coming from research projects; (e) semantic enablement of meta-data. To help solve these issues we propose a software infrastructure prototype developed in the framework of the SATFARMING project, and based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) concept, free open-source software (FOSS), interoperability of data and web services through the accomplishment of international standards, semantic enablement of data description.

The conceptual framework of Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) aims to capture the major dimensions of biodiversity change by structuring biodiversity monitoring and by ruling data collection amongst different providers. Amongst the research infrastructures adopting and implementing the EBV framework, LTER-Europe - the European node of ILTER (International Long-Term Ecological Research) - follows the approach to compare site-based biodiversity observations within and across its networks. However, a synoptic overview of their contributions with EBVs-relevant data is still missing, since data are not made available for several reasons. In this paper, we assess the capacity of LTER-Italy, one of the richest and heterogeneous networks of LTER sites in Europe, to provide data to “Species Distribution” and “Species Abundance” EBVs without inspecting and downloading their contents. To this aim, we mine the EBVs information which is publicly structured and shared by LTER site managers through DEIMS-SDR, the LTER-Europe online metadata repository. We classify the sites according to two types of contributions: (i) the actual contribution, based on metadata of datasets and (ii) the potential contribution, based on metadata of sites. Through these assessments, we investigate if LTER-Italy monitoring activities can provide EBVs measures and which sites currently provide datasets. By comparing the two contributions, we pinpoint the factors hampering the accessibility of LTER-Italy data and suggest solutions to increase the discoverability and reusability of LTER-Italy EBVs measurements. The research provides the first overview of EBVs monitored in LTER-Italy and the corresponding data management practices, as well as an evaluation of the interoperability of this network with respect to other research organisations for legal and technical aspects.

The sharing of research data allows for information reuse and knowledge advancement but its realization is often a challenge and seldom successful in practice. We propose a workflow for the design of a User Support System (USS) aimed at tutoring research groups in data sharing by considering their social and domain backgrounds. Our engagement approach focuses on multidisciplinary geospatial research, particularly when interoperable data sharing is required. Specifically, we first characterize the research community on the basis of the behavior and competences in data management by its groups and then target the needs of the latter with specific facilities. We address for the first time in literature the issue of modeling research groups as targets of the USS and provide a roadmap to standardize USS activities across different communities. We describe the implementation of the workflow in the context of an Italian research project and we assess the impact of the USS in terms of increase in the number of nodes and resources in the project’s data infrastructure, and of fulfilment of the expectations by the research groups.

The Open Science approach delineates high and inspiring principles. In order to really root them into the scientific community, a cultural shift must occur that can be fostered and achieved mainly through the development of practical case studies. This is particularly relevant in the field of ecology, a highly multidisciplinary science, where the Open Science issue has become a matter of discussion only in very recent years. In particular, in the context of long-term ecological research, enabling open sharing of in-situ and derived long-term ecological data is required to advance research and education in the European and global networks. The creation of marine ecological observatories, able to arrange and maintain integrated, harmonized and coherent long-term ecological observations, is stressed as a relevant step at the European level, for sustaining European marine policies. The Italian national flagship project RITMARE ("Italian research for the sea", http://www.ritmare.it/en/) fostered the development of a marine ecological observatory in the Northern Adriatic Sea (NAS), one of the 25 research parent sites belonging to the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER-Italy, http://www.lteritalia.it), through a dedicated research line. Within this context, we developed a specific task, aimed at testing and applying the Open Science approach to the NAS ecological observatory: "EcoNAOS - Ecological Northern Adriatic Open Science Observatory System". We present our plans and ideas for the application of the Open Science principles, starting from the 50-year ecological dataset of plankton and related biogeochemical parameters collected in the NAS, mainly in the Gulf of Venice. We introduce each of the different steps needed for "opening science": research ideas statement, raw data collection, data harmonization (structural, syntactic and semantic), ancillary data collection/recovery and metadatation, data and metadata publication, software publication, publication of results, and data citation. In order to share different expertise and include different points of view as essential outcomes themselves, researchers from the field of LTER and data management were involved in EcoNAOS since its start. Our final goal is to demonstrate that a change of vision is possible, leading from "publishing ASAP" to "sharing data and information and collaborating ASAP".

RITMARE is a Flagship Project by the Italian Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Universita e della Ricerca (MIUR) and coordinated by the National Research Council (CNR). It aims at the interdisciplinary integration of national marine research. In pursuing a Linked Open Data (LOD) vocation, the RITMARE sub-project 7 is building the necessary domain-related data structures by leveraging existing RDF-based schemata and sources. These data structures are grounding semantics- Aware profiling of end users, data providers, and resources. The goal is designing a flexible infrastructure that adapts to the audience's specificities. © 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.

Water quality is a multi-source, multi-purpose problem that needs exploiting observations, often taken by a number of heterogeneous bodies. This problem has been tackled within the Italian Long Term Ecological research network (LTER-Italy) in an experiment aimed at testing how ecological observations of mountain lakes water can be shared by OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard services of the Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative. A friendly and easy implementation of these services is fostered by the usage of the open source software Geoinformation Enabling Toolkit StarterKit ® (GET-IT). It has been used in the experiment to create SOS services, upload observations and create SensorML metadata of the involved sensors. This contribution describes the experiment and presents its results.

The rapid growth and development in different fields related to sensors has, together with the huge increase of devices due to the decrease of device costs, led to a shift from traditional monitoring, where the data collected is not subject to any management actions, to sensor/processing networks, where in the life cycle more stages are devoted to make the data accessible. Data integration is the first step in advanced environmental monitoring, but assuring that heterogeneous systems can interoperate is still a challenge. The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative defines a framework to address this issue, offering a set of standard models and interfaces to improve sensor interoperability and to face quality issues in the reliability of sensors. The need for seamless access to observations from marine sensors has been the focus of several research projects. This chapter presents the actions taken in the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure for project RITMARE to ease the adoption of SWE within the Italian marine community overcoming the main constraints in SWE adoption.

While spatial information quality is an established discipline in traditional scientific geographical information (GI), standards and protocols for representing and assessing the quality of geographic contributions generated by volunteers or by the generic ‘web crowd’ are still missing. This work offers an analysis of strategies for quality control and describes a simple representation of the components of the quality in crowdsourced GI. In this framework, and based on the research carried out in Criscuolo et al. (2014), we also introduce a methodology for quality assessment, based on the given representation, which goes beyond the limitations of previous methods in the literature defined for a specific purpose, being able to deal with many quality features, GI categories, and types of application. The method is designed as a decision making approach, so flexible as to take into account the purpose of GI analysis, and so transparent as to make explicit the criteria driving to quality evaluation, namely the quality features (e.g. the credibility of the volunteers, or the accuracy of the spatial features, etc.) and their relevance.

We present a data set on the biodiversity of Italian freshwaters, including lakeshores and riverbanks of natural (N=379: springs, streams and lakes) and artificial (N=11: fountains) sites. The data set belongs partly to the Italian Long Term Ecological Research network (LTER-Italy) and partly to LifeWatch, the European e-Science infrastructure for biodiversity and ecosystem research. The data included cover a time period corresponding to the last fifty years (1962-2014). They span a large number of taxa from prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes to vertebrates and plants, including taxa linked to the aquatic habitat in at least part of their life cycles (like immature stages of insects, amphibians, birds and vascular plants). The data set consists of 6463 occurrence data and distribution records for 1738 species. The complete data set is available in csv file format via the LifeWatch Service Centre.

Underwater light regime is widely considered the principal determinant of aquatic plant depth distribution. The majority of previous studies dealing with macrophytes in lakes have singled out Secchi disk transparency (SD) values as the key empirical proxy to explain the maximum depth of macrophyte colonization (Zc). Few studies have investigated the role played by lake morphometry in structuring macrophyte beds. Using a balanced dataset including 20 Italian lakes (10 shallow and 10 deep lakes), we analysed transparency and lake morphometric traits to investigate their possible effects on Zc. Our results demonstrate that lake area plays a significant role, and confirm a direct influence of SD values on Zc. Considering lakes with an equal degree of transparency, smaller lakes may yield a lower Zc than larger ones. Morphology has a great influence on lake ecological characteristics especially on water thermal conditions and mixing depth. Based on our data, we argue that the thermal stratification plays a non negligible role in explaining macrophytes zonation, due to its influence on macrophytes life cycles and phytoplankton vertical distribution. Therefore, the present data suggest the need to enhance and refine our knowledge about the relationship between aquatic plants distribution and lake thermal conditions to better model the response of macrophytes to climate change and eutrophication.