The increasing human pressure on habitats and species calls for a scientifically-informed approach to decision making to ensure sustainable management of natural resources which, in turn, requires reliable data. Protected areas play an important role as data providers, given their long-term institutional mandate for biodiversity conservation and environmental monitoring. Based on the experience of a long-term data management project in the Italian Alpine national parks, this paper aims to review the main challenges and share the lessons learnt. Many problems that may seem trivial to experienced scientists still need to be solved in protected areas. Rigorous data quality control, use of appropriate data management tools and acquisition of the necessary skills remain the main obstacles,while complete recovery and documentation of time series is an urgent priority. Notably, before data can be shared, protected areas ought to improve their data management systems, a task that can be achieved only with adequate resources and long-term vision. We propose some initiatives that protected areas, funding agencies and the scientific community can embrace to address these problems. The added value of our work lies in reporting and analysing the concrete data management requirements and problems of protected areas, thereby contributing to the ongoing discussion on data management and sharing by putting a spotlight on these topics through a bottom-up approach.

URBANO Ferdinando;  VITERBI Ramona;  PEDROTTI Luca;  VETTORAZZO Enrico;  MOVALLI Cristina;  CORLATTI Luca; 

2023-12-07

SPRINGER

JRC129761

0167-6369 (online),   

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10661-023-11851-0,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC129761,   

10.1007/s10661-023-11851-0 (online),