The LifeWatch Italy Community Platform is a dedicated virtual space where people who share the same goals, interests, or motivations can connect and build relationships, business and scientific opportunities. The Community facilitates the networking activities among registered members, that are able to create and manage working groups adding their peers based on their scientific skills. Working groups also include different tools for supporting networking activities such as calendar, repository, forum, blog, wiki, polls, brainstorming, and conference calls.

The phytoplankton traits thesaurus (PhytoTraits) is a reference work which properly describes concepts, represented by terms, widely used in phytoplankton functional ecology, focusing on morpho-functional traits. It contains approximately 120 terms and related semantic properties, decided and established under the agreement of a scientific expert community. PhytoTraits, providing harmonized concepts with associated unique and persistent identifiers (URI, Uniform Resource Identifier), has the potential to significantly reduce the barriers to data discovery, integration, and exchange.

The LifeWatch Italy Data Portal is a national data infrastructure facilitating data sharing for biological and environmental research and making it accessible and reusable.

The LifeWatch Italy Citizen Science platform is a place for sharing knowledge, tools, training material and other resources for participatory projects in biodiversity and ecosystem research. It is a platform that facilitates citizens involvement in scientific activities and it includes different sections to provide: - basic knowledge on citizen science, on its potential and applications; - best practices and tutorials on the development and management of citizen science projects; - a catalogue of citizen science projects with an open-source webGIS for viewing initiatives on a map-based interface; - a tool for creating mini-sites for citizen science projects; - a customisable web application supporting citizen science activities related to the collection of geo-referenced observations; - integration between various components and services of LifeWatch Italy.

The LifeWatch Italy Semantic Platform allows to search and access the LifeWatch Italy resources with the help of semantically enriched queries. It is based on a main semantic model that describes different resources and their metadata, as well as meaningful links between controlled vocabularies for Biodiversity and Ecosystems domain and resources of LifeWatch Italy. The platform is powered by a semantic search engine that can be used in two modes: simple or structured.

The Atlas of Shapes includes an illustrative scheme of the shapes subdivided in “Simple Shapes” and “Complex Shapes”. Clicking on a specific shape, users are able to see: the code and the name of the shape, the shape view (e.g., lateral, frontal, etc.) with the corresponding linear dimensions, the biovolume and surface area computational models with all the formulae associated. Clicking again on a specific shape, users will be redirected to all taxa present in the Atlas of Phytoplankton that are characterized by the selected shape. Atlas of shapes and Atlas of phytoplankton are integrated and can be easily joint switching from taxonomic identification to morphological characterization of phytoplankton.

The Atlas of phytoplankton is a guide for the identification of marine and freshwater species. It includes pictures, synonyms, morphological, morphometric and ecological characteristics and geographical distribution of the taxa. It also provides formulas to calculate the biovolume and surface area based on linear dimensions according to the organism view (e.g., lateral, frontal, etc.).

The size density relationships web service calculates and describes the relationships between size (total biovolume and total carbon content) and density for any given combination of spatial, temporal and taxonomic level of observations. The service works on datasets structured according to the Phytoplankton Data Template that can be selected by the GUI or uploaded by the researchers. The input file is in CSV format with some mandatory fields (density, biovolume or cell carbon content). Before selecting or uploading the input file, users have to specify some parameters (e.g., the trait to be used for the size distribution, the taxonomic level for the size distribution and the spatial and temporal levels for the clusterization of data). The web service provides as output a zip file containing two summary tables in csv format and a scatter plot.

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 Traits Computation web service provides a user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) that allow researchers to run a workflow wrapped into R code for the computation of morphological and demographic traits, such as biovolume, surface area, surface-volume ratio, density, cell carbon content, density, carbon content and total biovolume. The service works on datasets structured according to the Phytoplankton Data Template that can be selected by the GUI or uploaded by the researchers. The input file is in CSV format with some mandatory fields according to the calculation type. Before selecting or uploading the input file, users have to specify some parameters (e.g., the calculation type, and the traits to be computed). The web service provides as output a file in .csv format, including all input data and the new calculated traits.