Lichen data in Italy: aggregation, interoperability, and integrated services

The aggregation of biodiversity data plays a pivotal role for facing the challenges of global changes, as it allows researchers to address complex questions, gaining deeper insights on biodiversity patterns and ecological dynamics. As far as lichens are concerned, ITALIC, the information system on Italian lichens (https://italic.units.it) aggregates information and resources about 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, systematic, distributional, and ecological data. Furthermore, 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 occurrence data from herbaria, as well as from floristic- vegetational surveys and literature, for a total of about 140,000 records. All occurrence data are available under CC-BY license, thus allowing researchers to download and reuse them by properly citing the source. For increasing interoperability, data are made available in Darwin Core standard format. This also permits their aggregation in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), which was already achieved for ca. 20% of records. As a further service to the research community, most data are now accessible by means of standalone 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. By incorporating modular components and standardized data formats, the structure of the system has been designed to be replicable, and can be effectively adopted for aggregating biodiversity data across other taxonomic groups as well.