A novel approach to niche data aggregation and interoperability

Aggregation and interoperability of biodiversity data are pivotal tasks for properly understanding any issue related to global changes, since they allow researchers to analyse together datasets which originally were not created for being used together. As far as lichens are concerned, ITALIC, the information system on Italian lichens (https://italic.units.it) aggregates information and resources on the taxa known to occur in Italy, as well as a selection of taxa which should be looked for in the country. Since its creation, the system has evolved, becoming an aggregator of a wealth of nomenclatural, taxonomic, distributional, and ecological data. In the last 2 years, novel services were created, among which a name-matching tool to align scientific names to those accepted in the national checklist, and digital identification keys covering practically the whole lichen flora of Italy. Recently, ITALIC also started to aggregate and make interoperable occurrence data generated from the digitization of several herbaria, as well as from floristic-vegetational surveys and literature, for a total of about 140,000 records, all available under CC-BY license. This permits researchers to generate a novel dataset, which is made of data coming from different original datasets, download it, and reuse the data citing the source. In order to increase interoperability, data are made available in Darwin Core standard format, which also permits their aggregation in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). As a further service to the research community, most data are now accessible by means of stand-alone application programming interfaces (APIs), or via a package available in R and python. This allows the seamless integration of ITALIC tools and data into any research workflow.