Mobilising marine biodiversity data: a new malacological dataset of Italian records (Mollusca)

The location and palaeoceanographic history of the Mediterranean Sea make it a biodiversity hotspot, prompting extensive studies in this region. However, despite the marine biodiversity of this area being apparently widely studied, a large amount of distributional data for Mediterranean taxa is still unpublished or scattered in various sources and formats, causing severe limitations to their potential reuse. This emerges as a particularly thorny issue for highly biodiverse and neglected taxa, such as invertebrates. The mobilisation of these frozen data through a process of standardisation and georeferencing could potentially support biodiversity research and conservation. The aim of this work is to provide a standardised pipeline to integrate these dispersed data, focusing on the Italian waters of the Mediterranean Sea and using molluscs as target taxa. Data were gathered from two main sources: published literature and Natural History Collections. The harmonisation process involved three key steps: 1) terminology and structure standardisation; 2) taxonomy updating and 3) georeferencing. Our efforts yielded over 44000 standardised records of mollusc species from Italian seawaters. These records encompassed primary biodiversity data from newly-digitised specimens owned by 11 different institutions and private collectors, as well as secondary biodiversity data extracted from 311 published studies.