This service provides a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allow researchers to run a workflow wrapped into R code for: - the reshaping of the input dataset in order to obtain alien species and native specie richness for each family at the habitat and site level. If more that 1 EUNIS habitat is present in a site, the richness will be calculate for the two (or more that 2) habitats in the site; - the selection of the best fitting model, by calling a set of R functions from the packages lme4 and MuMIn. Initially, a full GLMM model is calculated including both richness and level-1 EUNIS habitat as fixed factor. Subsequently, reduced models are calculated and compared with the full model using the Akaike Information Criteria (AIC). The model showing the best AIC is used to create the output (tables and graph); - the plot of the rarefaction curves on the reshaped dataset.

The LifeWatch Italy national node has realised the Alien and Invasive Species Virtual Research Environment (Alien Species VRE) for supporting researchers to address basic and applied studies on ecosystem vulnerability to alien species arrival. The Alien Species VRE allows to: - access and download harmonised data on the national distribution of species of fauna and flora belonging to different habitats (marine, fresh and transitional waters, and terrestrial) published through the LifeWatch Italy Data Portal and distributed by the LifeWatch ERIC Metadata Catalogue; - upload their own datasets structured according to the LifeWatch Italy Data Schema in order to execute the service included in the VRE.