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December 2012 - present
Publications
Publications (174)
Biodiversity and ecosystems cannot be studied without assessing the impacts of changing environmental conditions. Since the 1980s, the U.S. National Science Foundation's Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network has been a major force in the field of ecology to better understand ecosystems. In Europe, the LTER developments are led by the the Int...
A profound transformation, in recent decades, is promoting shifts in the ways ecological science is produced and shared; as such, ecologists are increasingly encouraged to engage in dialogues with multiple stakeholders and in transdisciplinary research. Among the different forms of public engagement, citizen science (CS) has significant potential t...
We report a georeferenced dataset of a biological survey carried out in lakes and reservoirs in Piedmont and Sardinia regions (Italy), that includes fish fauna, macroinvertebrates, macrophytes, and phytoplankton. This survey was carried out to test the standardised protocols adopted with the National Decree 260/210 by the Italian Ministry of the En...
In the last decades, citizen science (CS) has experienced an increasing interest as a practice in which scientists and citizens collaborate to produce new knowledge for science, society and policy. Environmental and ecological sciences are among the most active in proposing CS activities and new models for citizen participation in research. In addi...
In this paper we describe a 25-year (1986-2010) dataset of phytoplankton cell density abundance and biovolume in Lake Candia, a eutrophic, natural, small, and shallow lake located in north-western Italy, with data that are made available through the GBIF repository. The lake belongs to the national (LTER-Italy), European (LTER-Europe) and Internati...
Implementing effective marine monitoring to detect and track ecosystem shifts, biodiversity alteration, and habitat loss is one of the most crucial challenges to meet the objectives set out by the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework and by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The lack of coordinated and harmonized monitoring frameworks at...
This Policy Brief succinctly presents the Ecological Observing System of the Adriatic Sea (ECOAdS), aimed at integrating the ecological and oceanographic dimensions within the conservation strategy of the Natura 2000 network, and to propose a way to go for its future development and maintenance. After a definition of marine ecological observatories...
Metadata descriptions are typically monolithic data structures and their denormalized, text-based nature yields shortcomings such as inconsistencies and heterogeneities. Moreover, fluidity of research environments, coupled with single-tenancy of metadata descriptions, impedes enforcing authority on the related datasets effectively. We propose a nov...
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 en...
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...
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 ph...
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 d...
In this paper we describe a 50-year (1965–2015) ecological database
containing data collected in the northern Adriatic Sea (NAS) at one of the 25
research parent sites belonging to the Italian Long Term Ecological Research
Network (LTER-Italy, http://www.lteritalia.it, last access: February 2020). LTER-Italy is a formal
member of the International...
Measuring marine biodiversity is essential to proper management of biological resources. Monitoring networks and observatory systems are adopting conceptual frameworks to agree on the fundamental variables describing the biodiversity change and to meaningfully inform policy makers. Biological and ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (bio-eco EOVs) a...
The adoption of Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) practices by sensor maintainers is hampered by the inherent complexity of the Sensor Model Language (SensorML), its high expressiveness, and the scarce availability of editing tools. To overcome these issues, the Earth Observation (EO) community often recurs to SensorML profiles narrowing the range of adm...
In this paper we describe a 50 years (1965–2015) ecological database containing data collected in the Northern Adriatic Sea, one of the 25 research parent sites belonging to the Italian Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER-Italy, http://www.lteritalia.it). LTER-Italy is a formal member of the international (https://www.ilter.network) and Eur...
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 appro...
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 (I...
This paper represents a review of the practical application, work done and near-future perspectives of an open scientific lifecycle model. The EcoNAOS (Ecological North Adriatic Open Science Observatory System) project is an example of the application of Open Science principles to long term marine research. For long term marine research we intend h...
Presentazione in occasione dello workshop "Scienza libera tutti!" organizzato da Successione Ecologica, il 26 Novembre 2018 presso l'Università di Milano Bicocca. Il contributo presenta il progetto EcoNAOS: un esperimento di Open Research Project Lifecycle applicato a dati ecologici marini a lungo termine (LTER) nella zona Nord del Mare Adriatico....
Citizen science, the active participation of the public in scientific research projects, is a rapidly expanding field in open science and open innovation. It provides an integrated model of public knowledge production and engagement with science. As a growing worldwide phenomenon, it is invigorated by evolving new technologies that connect people e...
Abstract: Providing long term, quality assured and reliable ecological data as input for scientific analysis workflows is one of the major aims of ecosystem monitoring and research. This allows the impact of ecological trends from climate change and/or land management policies to be detected and evaluated. In order to enable automation of the under...
Geospatial metadata are often encoded in formats that either are not aimed at efficient retrieval of resources or are plainly outdated. Particularly, the quantum leap represented by the Semantic Web did not induce so far a consistent, interlinked baseline in the geospatial domain. Datasets, scientific literature related to them, and ultimately the...
Da alcuni anni a chiunque voglia presentare un progetto di ricerca in ambito europeo, viene chiesto di rispettare i principi della Ricerca e Innovazione Responsabili (RRI), anticipando i possibili impatti e spiegando come le attività proposte produrranno un'innovazione "socialmente desiderabile e accet-tabile". Apertura della scienza, riflessività,...
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 infrastr...
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 i...
The current availability of devices capable of associating geographical objects with
their positions on Earth only partially solves the problems related to the location of
biodiversity data and, in any case, does not concern the data produced up to a recent
past.
The resolution of a toponym, that is the mapping process from a place name to its
“spa...
resources generated from a large number of disciplines, which need to be integrated
to advance the actual scientific knowledge. There is a clear need for integrative
research, but at the same time, it is very challenging to provide appropriate solutions
for the management of information.
Within the biological and ecological informatics communities,...
Providing quality controlled and reliable data as the basis for scientific analysis and as input for the evaluation of existing environmental policies is one of the major aims of long-term ecosystem monitoring and research not only in Europe (Mirtl 2010) but also on a global scale (Mirtl et al. 2018). In order to foster information exchange and sha...
The ambition of the eLTER Information System is to link distributed data sources provided by the long term monitoring community and allowing access to metadata and data from different data providers and providing a single point of access for the users to retrieve data. The eLTER Data
Integration Platform report lays out the basic components of the...
Providing quality controlled and reliable data as basis for scientific analysis and as input for environmental policies is one of the major aims of long term ecosystem monitoring and research. In order to foster information exchange and sharing, data must be discoverable and at least on the level of the metadata accessible. This requires proper doc...
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”, ttp://www.ritmare.it/en/) f...
A first synoptic and trans-domain overviewof plankton dynamics was conducted across the aquatic sites belonging to the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research Network (LTER-Italy). Based on published studies, checked and complemented with unpublished information, we investigated phytoplankton and zooplankton annual dynamics and long-term changes acro...
Long-term ecological research (LTER) is performed in many countries across the globe by scientists that gather and analyse multidecadal ecological observations and data, to support understanding and management of the environment. LTER data are used to describe the state and dynamics of an ecosystem. This valuable research is in charge of experts in...
The chapter investigates the kinds of imperfection affecting Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI) created by users eager to participate in some citizen science project. An approach based on the use of fuzzy domain ontologies and level-based approximate reasoning is suggested to represent and manage both the uncertainty of volunteers when describi...
Geo-referencing is one of the most problematic and troublesome steps in digitization of occurrence data. In
museum samples, spatial references are typically provided as textual description of localities, an “informal”
technique that requires appropriate processing in order to become a “formal” representation. The e-Biodiversity
Research Institute L...
In the last few decades, functional trait-based approaches have undergone an extraordinary expansion in phytoplankton ecology, due to the relative simplicity and the well-defined traits that determine the ecological niche of these organisms. A large quantity of heterogeneous and distributed data has been produced on phytoplankton traits and their u...
The European Network for Long Term Ecological Research (LTER-Europe - http://www.lter-europe.net) is a network of more than 400 ecological interest sites on which researchers carry out decadal-scale ecological investigations. Leading research institutions, universities and governmental agencies manage the sites and produce long term ecological data...
Traditionally, maps and data were analyzed and created by desktop software tools. Today, thanks to World Wide Web, open source software tools and international standards, practitioners and researchers can share maps, data, and measures. Sharing can be done with different software tools, proprietary or open source, and with varying degrees of intero...
Traditionally, maps and data were analyzed and created by desktop software tools. Today, thanks to World Wide Web, open source software tools and international standards, practitioners and researchers can share maps, data, and measures. Sharing can be done with different software tools, proprietary or open source, and with varying degrees of intero...
The eLTER Information System Architecture report lays out the basic components of the IT infrastructure that will be built to support data management, integration and dissemination across the eLTER network. The design of the architecture is based on existing software components and uses international standards to ensure compatibility not only withi...
The aim at this work was to identify in the frame of ECOPOTENTIAL a relevant list of data available at protected areas. The approach was focused on two directions, first was to identify the data sources providing ready to use data for remote sensing and modelling purposes and the second was to find specific data available or existing at the protect...
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...
Metadata management is an essential enabling factor for geospatial assets because discovery, retrieval, and actual usage of the latter are tightly bound to the quality of these descriptions. Unfortunately, the multi-faceted landscape of metadata formats, requirements, and conventions makes it difficult to identify editing tools that can be easily t...
Il georiferimento è una delle fasi più problematiche e delicate della digitalizzazione dei dati di occorrenza. Nel tempo numerosi sono stati gli strumenti e le procedure proposti per (semi-) automatizzare tale processo e ottenere risultati di elevato livello qualitativo. Benché neppure i dati recenti siano immuni da problemi, le maggiori difficoltà...
EDI is a general purpose, template-driven metadata editor for creating XML-based descriptions. Originally aimed at defining rich and standard metadata for geospatial resources, It can be easily customised in order to comply with a broad range of schemata and domains. EDI creates HTML5 [9] metadata forms with advanced assisted editing capabilities a...
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 (Op...
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...
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 (Op...
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 (Op...
On a global scale, different governmental agencies implemented dedicated Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) to publish geological, geotechnical and geothematic maps, datasets and metadata. In most cases, the geoportals of SDI use different types of both visual and textual representation of the information and the geological data of each nation are...
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 (Op...
In the geospatial realm, data annotation and discovery rely on a number of ad-hoc formats and protocols. These have been created to enable domain-specific use cases generalized search is not feasible for. Metadata are at the heart of the discovery process and nevertheless they are often neglected or encoded in formats that either are not aimed at e...
The need for continuous, accurate, and comprehensive environmental knowledge has led to an increase in sensor observation systems and networks. The Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) initiative has been promoted by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to foster interoperability among sensor systems. The provision of metadata according to the prescribed Se...
Assessing the status and trends of the environment requires the collection, management and publication of spatially referred observations. Since many years, Long-Term Ecological Research sites in Europe collect ecological data, resulting in long-term data series. Nowadays, advanced software tools can enable discovering, accessing, and distributing...
Italy is a biodiversity hotspot. The issue of biodiversity is an high priority in the political agenda at the national level since we have realised that our quality of life depends on biodiversity and the related ecosystem services and also because tourism is an important component of the economic balance in many Italian regions, due to their beaut...
