The combination of increasing pollution, resource overexploitation and climate change is driving our planet outside his pre-industrial niche across key abiotic and biotic dimensions determining unprecedented pressures on all components of the biological diversity. Monitoring the response of biological diversity at all levels of complexity, from the genetic and phenotypic to the community, regional and biogeographical ones, is critical to test and progressively realign their scenarios of change with actual biological diversity dynamics, building science support to policy.

LifeWatch ERIC, the eScience European Infrastructure on biodiversity and ecosystem research together with its National Distributed Centres engages and supports, through a range of digital services, in advancing monitoring of biological diversity responses to current global changes.

Here, I will present the services developed by LifeWatch Italy, as National Distributed Centre of the ERIC, for monitoring changes in biological diversity. Services, accessible by the LifeWatch Italy website, deal with all aspects of data curation, analysis and modelling. Unique data curation services address meta (data) annotation and harmonization through controlled vocabularies provided by the EcoPortal - the LifeWatch repository of semantic artefacts on ecological domain -, and taxonomic validation, through the Italian Taxonomic Backbone based on the Italian checklists of plants and animals, co-designed by a group of LifeWatch Italy institutions. A collaborative modelling platform – DataLabs – and Virtual Research Environments – NaaVREs – based on Jupyter Notebook are accessible for monitoring data analysis and modelling.

A standardize procedure for service co-design and co-construction has been established in Lifewatch. An example is the ‘sRedList’ platform, co-developed with research groups of Sapienza University and IUCN, for facilitating and streamlining the work of Red List assessors.

Same process is open to research groups of the LifeWatch Italy member Institutions and to NBFC research groups.