Aggregation of occurrence data in FlorItaly, the portal to the flora of Italy

Data collected in floristic and vegetation surveys are essential for botanical and ecological studies. Unfortunately, after serving the specific scope for which they have been collected, these data often remain locked-up and inaccessible to the rest of the scientific community. The aggregation of data collected from multiple sources into a single, freely accessible, database represents a key step to generate further insights. The great advantage of aggregated database systems lies in the ability to retrieve, reuse and summarise information to investigate general patterns. Despite all fields of botanical and ecological sciences take advantage from data aggregation, studies on the effects of large-scale changes can be primary beneficiaries. Indeed, these changes are altering biodiversity and ecosystems at unprecedented rates, to the point we entered the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. Occurrence data, which are used for distribution modeling and niche evolution studies, are fundamental to understand the impact of global changes, and assess their magnitude. In Italy, only a fraction of existing occurrence data can be easily accessed and downloaded online. Thus, the use of these data for inferring the impact of global changes on Italian biodiversity and ecosystems is still very limited. In this study, 497,025 georeferenced occurrences of vascular plants from two national-level vegetation databases, namely Vegetation Plot Database – Sapienza University of Rome and Alma Mater Studiorum VegBank – University of Bologna were aggregated, and will become available in the next release of FlorItaly, the portal to the vascular flora of Italy. The aggregated database includes 7,989 infrageneric taxa. After nomenclatural alignment, by means of the name-match function of FlorItaly, 7,126 taxa (89%) had their names aligned to the Italian checklist, resulting in 5,111 accepted infrageneric taxa. The remaining 863 names could not be resolved. However, they make up only less than 2% (10,005) of the total occurrences in the database. All the data will be exposed in the taxon pages of FlorItaly, and will be available for download in Darwin Core format. This study, carried out in the framework of the activities of the Inter-University Center PlantData, is a first step towards the aggregation of several different types of botanical data for the flora of Italy, ranging from functional traits to ethnobotanical data.