Biodiversity Data Journal 11: e101327 (eo @) doi: 10.3897/BDJ.11.e101327 open access Data Paper Robber flies and hover flies (Insecta, Diptera, Asilidae and Syrphidae) in beech forests of the central Apennines: a contribution to the inventory of insect biodiversity in Italian State Nature Reserves Alice Lenzi#§!, Daniele Birtele!, Silvia Gisondi*!, Mario Romano*, Bruno Petriccione”, Pierfilippo Cerretti8, Alessandro Campanaro?! + Consiglio per la ricerca in agricoltura e l’analisi dell’economia agraria — Centro di ricerca Difesa e Certificazione, Firenze, Italy § Dipartimento di Biologia e Biotecnologie ‘Charles Darwin’, Sapienza Universita di Roma, Roma, Italy | NBFC, National Biodiversity Future Center, Palermo, Italy 4 Carabinieri Biodiversita, Reparto di Verona — Centro Nazionale Carabinieri Biodiversita “Bosco Fontana", Marmirolo (Mantova), Italy # Raggruppamento Carabinieri Biodiversita, Reparto di Castel di Sangro, Castel di Sangro (L'Aquila), Italy = Colonnello dei Carabinieri per la Biodiversita, nella riserva, Castel di Sangro, Italy Corresponding author: Alice Lenzi (alice.lenzi@crea.gov.it) Academic editor: Torsten Dikow Received: 01 Feb 2023 | Accepted: 01 May 2023 | Published: 11 May 2023 Citation: LenziA, Birtele D, Gisondi S, Romano M, Petriccione B, Cerretti P, Campanaro A (2023) Robber flies and hover flies (Insecta, Diptera, Asilidae and Syrphidae) in beech forests of the central Apennines: a contribution to the inventory of insect biodiversity in Italian State Nature Reserves. Biodiversity Data Journal 11: e101327. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.11.e101327 Abstract Background The present paper describes a sampling-event dataset on species belonging to two families of Diptera (Syrphidae and Asilidae) collected between 2012 and 2019 in two Italian beech forests located in the central Apennines. The reference dataset consists of an annotated checklist and has been published on Zenodo. Syrphidae and Asilidae are two © Lenzi A et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. 2 Lenzi A et al widespread and key ecological groups, including predator, pollinator and saproxylic species. Despite their pivotal role in both natural and man-made ecosystems, these families are still poorly known in terms of local distribution and open-access sampling- event data are rare in Italy. New information This open-access dataset includes 2,295 specimens for a total of 21 Asilidae and 65 Syrphidae species. Information about the collection (e.g. place, date, methods applied, collector) and the identification (e.g. species name, author, taxon ID) of the species is provided. Given the current biodiversity crisis, the publication of checklists, sampling-event data and datasets on insect communities in open-access repositories is highly recommended, as it represents the opportunity to share biodiversity information amongst different stakeholders. Moreover, such data are also a valuable source of information for nature reserve managers responsible for monitoring the conservation status of protected and endangered species and habitats and for evaluating the effects of conservation actions over time. Keywords insect diversity, biodiversity, Malaise trap, dataset, Zenodo repository, Diptera, robber flies, hover flies, sampling-event data. Introduction Negative trends and remarkable changes in insect biodiversity have been recorded in the last decades (Wagner et al. 2021, Outhwaite et al. 2022). Recent analyses have also demonstrated that a steep decline is affecting both species richness and abundance (Hallmann et al. 2017, Habel et al. 2019, Powney et al. 2019, Hallmann et al. 2021). Thus, considering that the knowledge of natural communities is still superficial [e.g. more than 80% of species have not yet been described (Mora et al. 2011, Wilson 2017)] and given the unprecedented and pressing extinction rates (De Vos et al. 2014, Ceballos et al. 2015), an alarming scenario may result: populations or species could become extinct before we know their ecology, their distribution, their conservation status or even their existence (Costello et al. 2013, Raven and Wagner 2021). In this context, a large amount of data is highly needed to achieve a sufficient awareness of species diversity, especially in species-rich insect groups (VWagner 2020). Unfortunately, standardised open-access datasets are not available for long-term analyses and spatial records of insects are rare (Rocha-Ortega et al. 2021). Furthermore, the already published datasets are rarely fully accessible or reusable (Boeckhout et al. 2018) and do not comply with Open Science and FAIR Data policies (Wilkinson et al. 2016). In particular, in the Italian research scenario, sharing raw data is not really a common practice. For example, Robber flies and hover flies (Insecta, Diptera, Asilidae and Syrphidae) ... 3 sampling-event data or checklists are often published as appendices in non-open access journals, published in local newsletters and gazetteers or not even considered worthy of publication (e.g. data collected through project actions). Dealing with nature conservation in protected areas, a communication gap lies between researchers and site managers, who often host sampling activities carried out for scientific purposes without receiving any feedback (McNie 2007, Gibbons et al. 2008, Merkle et al. 2019). Instead, occurrence data from the above-mentioned activities could be extremely valuable in order to build up a solid knowledge on biodiversity and community structure of protected areas, both of which are the basis for monitoring of the conservation status of species, evaluating the impact of conservation actions and planning appropriate management strategies. In addition, the extrapolation of occurrence data on protected species represents baseline information for the designation of Natura 2000 sites and the national reporting under the Habitats Directive (92/43/EEC). This given, it is therefore important to set up long-term studies and develop open and shared historical datasets that will allow to know and to monitor the biodiversity composition within a given area (Mirtl and Krauze 2007, Campanaro and Parisi 2021, Minelli et al. 2021). However, recent projects and initiatives aiming at the assessment of insect diversity have been launched, both at national level (e.g. Hausmann et al. (2020), Karlsson et al. (2020), Birtele (2021), Sommaggio and Birtele (2021), Bologna et al. (2022)) or with a focus on specific functional groups (e.g. pollinators, Potts et al. (2015), Potts et al. (2020)). In the above scenario, Diptera constitutes an extremely challenging taxon. In fact, it is one of the largest insect orders on Earth, with hundreds of thousands of undescribed species in addition to the approximately 160,000 currently named ones (Courtney et al. 2017, Wiegmann and Yeates 2017) belonging to approx. 180 families worldwide (Bertone et al. 2008, Brown 2009, Courtney and Cranston 2015). Flies exhibit an impressive diversity of biological traits, such as feeding habits, behaviour and life histories, due to their ability to exploit several important ecological niches (i.e. they include scavengers, predators, pollinators, parasites and parasitoids). However, as proved by recent studies, this species diversity is still greatly underestimated (Hebert et al. 2016, Forbes et al. 2018), as well as the bionomy, distribution (especially at local scale) and conservation status of most taxa. Furthermore, Diptera are often excluded from studies, checklists and assessments on local biodiversity, mainly due to the difficulties in their identification process, which is usually time-consuming and requires highly skilled taxonomists. Asilidae and Syrphidae are two of the most species-rich dipteran families (both including approximately 7,000 known species) (Pape et al. 2011) with a worldwide distribution. They include pollinators, predators and saproxylic species inhabiting both natural and man-made environments (Dunn et al. 2020, Verissimo et al. 2020). Asilidae (‘robber flies’ or ‘assassin flies’) are predators both during the larval stages and as adults (Musso 1983, Dennis et al. 2013), a rare feature amongst Diptera. Thus, they are key species directly controlling insect populations and maintaining community equilibrium (Wei et al. 1995). Syrphidae (‘hover flies’ or ‘flower flies’) are known to be one of the most important dipteran pollinator groups (Larson et al. 2012), as the adults are mainly anthophilous (Sack 1932, Vockeroth and Thompson 1987). They can be considered good environmental indicators in Europe (Sommaggio 1999, Maleque et al. 2009); in fact, the taxonomy, as well as the ecological characteristics of most species, are 4 Lenzi A et al well Known (Speight 2014). In addition, the larval stages of some groups are saproxylic, thus closely associated with veteran trees and dead wood (Fayt et al. 2006, Ricarte et al. 2009, Birtele and Hardersen 2012). Other groups are instead predators in the immature stages, mainly as aphid eaters and are potential biological control agents (Schneider 1969, Bugg et al. 2008, Dunn et al. 2020). The present paper describes a dataset of Asilidae and Syrphidae species occurrences in field collections carried out between 2012 and 2019 in two beech forest areas in central Italy, included in the protected areas “Foresta Demaniale Regionale Chiarano-Sparvera’” and "Vallone di Teve" in the State Nature Reserve “Monte Velino" (LAquila Province, Abruzzo). General description Purpose: Our overall purpose is to promote the collection and publication of raw data and information on insect communities inhabiting the Italian State Nature Reserves. In the present publication, we describe a dataset on sampling-event data of species belonging to two Diptera families. This dataset could be considered as a starting point for the implementation of additional future sampling campaigns in order to establish long-term data series for biodiversity surveillance and to obtain a reliable source of information for the management and conservation of the natural environment. Project description Title: Specimens were collected within three projects: (i) LIFEOQ9 ENV/IT/000078 - Management of Forests, Carbon and Biodiversity (ManFor C.BD), (ii) LIFE17 ESC/IT/001 360 - Volunteers for monitoring forest biodiversity in the Italian Natura 2000 Network (LIFE ESC360) and (iii) a collaboration agreement between Sapienza Universita di Roma and the Carabinieri special division “Laboratorio Nazionale Tassonomia e_ Bioindicazione Invertebrati - Reparto Biodiversita Carabinieri di Verona (LanaBit)”. Personnel: General information about the above-mentioned projects and the involved institutions is provided in Table 1. Sampling methods Sampling description: Samplings were performed using Malaise traps and hand collections (i.e. net collections). A total of 17 traps were installed and activated (Table 2) and the solution employed for preserving the specimens was 70% ethanol. Traps were emptied every 15 days by the project staff or volunteers (i.e. during LIFE ESC360). Step description: The collected specimens were analysed in well-equipped laboratories: they were preliminarily sorted at family level to select specimens belonging to the target groups, then identified to species level. Table 1. Robber flies and hover flies (Insecta, Diptera, Asilidae and Syrphidae) ... List of the projects under which samplings were carried out. Project name, duration and partners names, as well as collection periods and names of the study areas are reported. Project name Project Partners duration LIFEO9 ENV/IT/000078 2010 — - CNR — National Research Council ‘LIFE ManFor C.BD’ 2015 and Economics - Molise Region - Slovenian Forestry Institute - Veneto Region LIFE17 ESC/IT/001 2018 — - Comando Unita Forestali, Ambientali e ‘LIFE ESC360’ 2022 Agroalimentari Carabinieri (CUFA) -D.R.E.Am. — Italia Soc. Coop. Agr. and Economics Scientific activities carried 2019 —- out under collaboration 2020 agreement Table 2. - CREA — Council for Agricultural Research - University of Molise, Department of Science and Technology for Environment and Territory - CREA - Council for Agricultural Research - Sapienza Universita di Roma, ‘Charles Darwin’ Department of biology and biotechnologies - Laboratorio Nazionale Tassonomia e Bioindicazione Invertebrati - Ufficio Reparto Biodiversita Carabinieri di Verona (LanaBit) Sampling Study area period May —Aug__ F.D. 2012 Chiarano- May — Sept Sparvera 2014 July-—Oct Vallone di Teve July-Oct FD. Chiarano- Sparvera Information on Malaise traps. Trap ID, name of the study area in which the trap was installed, coordinates in EPSG:4326 - WGS84 (DD.DDDD‘°), altitude and the period of sampling are reported. Trap ID Study area Mal_01 F.D. Mal_02 F.D. Mal_03 F.D. Mal_04 F.D. Mal_05 F.D. Mal_06 F.D. Mal_07 F.D. Mal_08 F.D. Mal_09 F.D. Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Chiarano-Sparvera Geographical Coordinates Latitude 41.8680 41.8557 41.8774 41.8747 41.8722 41.8705 41.8698 41.8691 41.8628 Longitude 13.9667 13.9600 13.9713 13.9638 13.9596 13.9599 13.9596 13.96038 13.9650 1,613 1,746 1,397 1,490 1,542 1,552 1,566 1,553 1,587 Altitude (m) Sampling period May — Aug 2012 May — Sept 2014 June — Aug 2012 June — Oct 2014 July — Oct .2019 Juy — Oct 2019 July — Oct 2019 July — Oct 2019 July — Oct 2019 July — Oct 2019 July — Oct 2019 6 Lenzi A et al Trap ID Study area Geographical Coordinates Altitude (m) Sampling period Latitude Longitude Mal_10 F.D.Chiarano-Sparvera 41.8624 13.9638 1,611 July — Oct 2019 Mal_11 F.D.Chiarano-Sparvera 41.8598 13.9634 1,639 July — Oct 2019 Mal_12 F.D.Chiarano-Sparvera 41.8601 13.9641 1,632 July — Oct 2019 Mal_13 Vallone di Teve 42.1682 13.3595 1,453 July — Oct 2019 Mal_14 Vallone di Teve 42.1704 13.3623 1,479 July — Oct 2019 Mal_15 Vallone di Teve 42.1702 13.3664 1,513 July — Oct 2019 Mal_16_ Vallone di Teve 42.1717 13.3702 1,548 July — Oct 2019 Mal_17 Vallone di Teve 42.1725 13.3744 1,637 July — Oct 2019 Geographic coverage Description: The dataset includes information on species collected in two beech forests of the central Apennines, in the Abruzzo Region (Italy) (Fig. 1). Forest typologies belong to the EUNIS habitat type Fagus forest on non-acid soils (European Environmental Agency, EUNIS Habitat Classification 2021) and to the priority habitat 9210* (*“Apennine beech forests with Taxus and /lex, EU Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC). The forests are included in two protected areas managed by Arma dei Carabinieri, Comando Unita Forestali, Ambientali e Agroalimentari (CUFA). The first area is the Foresta Demaniale Regionale Chiarano-Sparvera (L'Aquila Province) (from now F.D. Chiarano-Sparvera), partially overlapping the Special Area of Conservation (SAC) 117110205 “Parco Nazionale d'Abruzzo”. The second area is Vallone di Teve (L'Aquila Province), a glacial mountain valley included in the protected area State Nature Reserve “Monte Velino’, the SAC IT7110206 “Monte Sirente e Monte Velino” and the Special Protection Area (SPA) IT7110130 “Sirente Velino”. The samplings were carried out in clearings within the forests, between 1,397 m a.s.I. and 1,746 maz.s.l. Coordinates: 41.8598 and 42.1725 Latitude; 13.3594 and 13.9713 Longitude. Taxonomic coverage Description: The published dataset contains records of individuals belonging to Syrphidae and Asilidae (Diptera) inhabiting beech forests. Each collected specimen was identified to species level by an expert taxonomist (DB), though only the genus name is given in case of uncertain species identification. Robber flies and hover flies (Insecta, Diptera, Asilidae and Syrphidae) ... 7 SR: WGS 84/UTM ZONE 33N, EPSG: 32633 1:25,000 SCALE 500 0 500 m —__—— @ Malaise traps 4637000 4636500 re Siete SESE Malt07 Mal/08 Mal_01 + t+ ~BRUZZO. \ Mal_09 HR ee PR CS Sper Spe Mal ein 4636000 Se) —————— " é TEES | 7 4 he. eo ey att . aS 4 . fi x y oo A ‘ > ae a ¥ 4 < ~ * > x ‘ Nah De + | See %.. wt 3 \ ~ \ fb ‘ { te ‘ ee | — SOs. Sa bute FV 4 7 £56 : DP Ae wat ' ’ St \ ee Bs »| ved CEM 7 ir 5 P ‘ ° } » el s . 4635500 4635000 4634500 4634000 ae ’ a mo al —_eme —— 363500 364000 364500 365000 365500 366000 366500 413000 413500 414000 414500 415000 415500 Figure 1. EES] Study areas (scale bar and north pointer are reported for figures B and C). A. Location of the study area in Italy. B. Study area “Vallone di Teve”, black dots correspond to the five Malaise traps of the area. C. Study area “F.D. Chiarano-Sparvera’”, black dots correspond to the 12 Malaise traps of the area. The coordinates of the traps are reported in Table 2. Temporal coverage Data range: 2012-5-23 - 2012-8-17; 2014-5-14 - 2014-10-06; 2019-7-05 - 2019-10-14. Notes: Samplings were carried out in the following periods: from May to August 2012, from May to October 2014 and from July to October 2019. Collection data Specimen preservation method: Specimens were preserved in ethanol or mounted on cards or pinned and dried. The entomological material is currently deposited at “Laboratorio Nazionale Tassonomia e Bioindicazione Invertebrati - Reparto Biodiversita Carabinieri di Verona” (LanaBit) (Verona, Italy). Usage licence Usage licence: Creative Commons Public Domain Waiver (CC-Zero) Lenzi A et al Data resources Data package title: Asilidae and Syrphidae (Insecta: Diptera) inhabiting beech forests in central Italy. Number of data sets: 1 Data set name: Asilidae and Syrphidae (Insecta: Diptera) inhabiting beech forests in central Italy. Download URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7593442 Data format: The dataset is available as .csv file. Description: The dataset “Asilidae and Syrphidae (Insecta: Diptera) inhabiting beech forests in central Italy’ was published on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo. 7593442) as an open access file and under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. The file consists of annotated checklists of robber flies (Asilidae) and hover flies (Syrphidae) (Insecta, Diptera). The terms used for naming the fields in the dataset follow the Darwin Core standard (Darwin Core Maintenance Group 2021: Wieczorek et al. (2012) (https://dwe.tdwg.org/ terms/). The harmonisation of the dataset concerning information about taxa identification, authorship, LSID (i.e. an identifier for the nomenclatural details of the scientific names) and the massive upgrading of the related identifiers in Zenodo record were performed using the dplyr taxize and zen4r packages in R, respectively (Chamberlain and Sz6cs 2013, Blondel and Barde 2020). The list of terms used in the present dataset are briefly described below: catalogNumber (i.e. a unique identifier of the record), order, family, genus, epithet, scientificName (genus species or genus of the biological entity), verbatimldentification, scientificNameAuthorship, individualCount (total number of the individuals sampled), sex, disposition (where the samples are located at the edge), year, month (in which the sample was collected), habitat (habitat type according to EUNIS habitat classification 2021), samplingProtocol, Country, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, geodeticDatum, locality, minimumElevationInMetres, maximumElevationInMetres, recordedBy, identifiedBy, scientificNamelD (i.e. the unique identifier for the species; if the specific names do not have a match in the Fauna Europea Database, the field is blank and the “scientificName” reported corresponds to the name indicated by the expert entomologist), taxonID (i.e. the identifier for the set of taxon information), nameAccordingTo (i.e. the reference to the source in which the specific taxon concept circumscription is defined or implied). The dataset contains 1,031 records for a total of 2,295 specimens (407 asilids and 1,888 syrphids), corresponding to 86 known species (21 asilids and 65 syrphids) belonging to 41 genera, plus 19 syrphid taxa only identified at genus level. As reported in Tables 1 and 2, samplings were carried out in different periods and with a different Robber flies and hover flies (Insecta, Diptera, Asilidae and Syrphidae) ... 9 sampling effort each year; thus, it is not possible to compare the obtained results. However, in Table 3, the results obtained in the two study areas and for the three years of samplings are summarised with the indication of the percentage of unique taxa (i.e. species found only in a specific year/area). Detailed information on the number of specimens and species collected per year and study Table 3. area. Year Area N of Malaise traps 2012 F.D. 2 Chiarano- Sparvera 2014 F.D. 2 Chiarano- Sparvera 2019 F.D. 10 Chiarano- Sparvera 2019 Vallonedi 5 Teve Column label catalogNumber order family genus specificEpithet scientificName verbatimldentification taxonRank scientificNameAuthorship basisOfRecord Number of N of N of N of N of N of species specimens Asilidae Asilidae Syrphidae Syrphidae species specimens species specimens Total Unique species 21 10% 87 7 30 14 57 40 40% 584 11 73 39 511 46 52% 1,224 14 285 32 939 47 51% 400 4 19 43 381 Column description An identifier of the occurrence within the dataset. The full scientific name of the order in which the taxon is classified. The full scientific name of the family in which the taxon is classified. The full scientific name of the genus in which the taxon is classified. The name of the epithet in the scientificName (e.g. bombylans for scientificName "Volucella bombylans"). The full scientific name of the taxon. A string representing the taxonomic identification as it appeared in the original record. The lower taxonomic rank assigned to the identified specimen (e.g. subspecies, species, genus, tribe). The authorship information for the scientificName. The specific nature of the data record (e.g. preserved specimens, fossil specimen, living specimen, occurrence, observed event). 10 individualCount sex disposition eventDate habitat samplingProtocol country decimalLatitude decimalLongitude geodeticDatum Lenzi A et al The number of individuals of the same species collected in the same trap at the same time. The sex of the collected specimen(s). The current state of the specimen(s). The date interval during which the specimen(s) was collected. The EUNIS category of the habitat in which the specimen(s) was collected. The names of the methods or protocols used during the sampling. The name of the country in which the specimen(s) was collected. The geographic latitude (in decimal degrees, EPSG:4326 - WGS84) of the geographic centre in which the specimen(s) was collected. The geographic latitude (in decimal degrees, EPSG:4326 - WGS84) of the geographic centre in which the specimen(s) was collected. The ellipsoid, geodetic datum or spatial reference system (SRS), upon which the geographic coordinates given in decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude are based. coordinateUncertaintyInMetres The horizontal distance (in metres) from the given decimalLatitude and locality minimumElevationInMetres maximumElevationInMetres recordedBy identifiedBy institutionCode scientificNamelD taxonID nameAccordingTo Acknowledgements decimalLongitude describing the smallest circle. The specific description of the place in which the sampling was carried out. The lower limit of the range of elevation (above sea level), in metres. The higher limit of the range of elevation (above sea level), in metres. The person or the group responsible for collecting the specimen(s). Person who assigned the Taxon to the collected specimen(s). The name (or acronym) in use by the institution having custody of the specimen(s). The identifier for the nomenclatural (not taxonomic) details of a scientific name. The global unique identifier for the set of taxon information (data associated with the Taxon class). The identifier for the source in which the specific taxon concept circumscription is defined or implied. Samplings were carried out with the collaboration of the various project partners cited in Table 1. In particular, LIFEO9 ENV/IT/000078 ‘ManFor C.B.D.’ funded collection campaigns in 2012 and 2014, whereas LIFE17 ESC/IT/001 ‘LIFE project ESC360’ funded samplings in 2019. 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