Ricerc@Sapienza

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).