Biodiversity, the variability among living organisms, is declining globally, and this has prompted strong conservation commitments from most of the world's countries, including Italy. Conservation action requires a good knowledge of the distribution of biodiversity and of the important sites for the persistence of biodiversity. Yet, due to the paucity of data, conservation assessments usually represent biodiversity through few well-known taxonomic groups of vertebrates and only at the species level. Yet the congruence of spatial patterns of biodiversity across taxa and levels is only partial, thus equating biodiversity to vertebrate species richness is an unwarranted assumption. The objective of this project is to model patterns of animal diversity in Italy using a comprehensive characterization of diversity, including genetic and species diversity, vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. We will create a database on the distribution and genetic diversity of Italian animals, containing information on intra-specific diversity and species occurrences. We will populate the database with data from existing databases, bibliographic data, collections not yet digitized, and new invertebrate data collected in field campaigns. We will map spatial patterns of intra-specific lineages and species diversity, and use them to identify important sites for the persistence of Italian animal diversity using the Key Biodiversity Areas methodology, a standard developed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and natural resources (IUCN).
The innovation of our proposed project is threefold.
1. Biodiversity, the variability among living organisms, is theoretically described as the variability of life along structural, compositional and functional dimensions, and across the genetic, population, species, community, and ecosystem levels (Noss 1990). The congruence of spatial patterns among dimensions and levels of biodiversity, as well as across different taxonomic groups, is only partial. When different taxa are analysed, patterns of spatial richness and community similarity do not match. Su et al. (2004) found marked differences between birds, butterflies and vascular plants. Moritz et al. (2001) found that invertebrates predicted important sites for the conservation of vertebrates, but not vice versa. Due to the paucity of data, most conservation assessments represent biodiversity through one or few indicators (species richness, extinction risk), along just one dimension (compositional), one level (species), and few taxa (typically vertebrates). Yet equating biodiversity to vertebrate species richness is an unwarranted assumption. Our project aims at characterizing biodiversity at two different levels (intra-specific and species-level diversity) and with very disparate taxa. This broad characterization of biodiversity will on one hand produce a more accurate identification of important sites for its persistence, and on the other hand will give us a chance to assess the congruence of measures of biodiversity across levels and taxa.
2. Our database will advance over previous sources (the Checklist of Italian fauna, CKmap) because it will contain updated taxonomy, accurately georeferenced point locality records (the Checklist did not store spatial information, while CK Map did it grid cells with 10 km resolution), and information below the species level. Our database will also contain new field data collected for this project specifically. Our database will provide new data to the National Network of Biodiversity, delivering an expanded baseline for future zoological research in Italy.
3. The KBA criteria have been only recently (2016) established in their final form, and have not been extensively applied. Our assessment will be the first of its kind at national level, and will enable important analyses of the congruence of KBAs across taxa as well as testing of the KBA criteria: e.g., comparison of number and coverage of KBAs identified with quantitative irreplaceability analysis (criterion E) vs. other KBAs.