A century of limnological research in the Historical Archive of the CNR ISE

Since 2010, the Historical Archive of the Italian Institute of Ecosystem Studies has been subject to an extensive rearrangement and improvement program. The Archive contains original documents (such as letters, administrative documents, notarial deeds, drawings and prints, photographic plates, photographs) recording the scientific and administrative activities from the foundation of the Institute (1938) till its annexation to the Italian National Research Council (1977). Furthermore, it hosts some material documenting studies that were conducted in the first decades of the XIX Century, mainly by Marco De Marchi (1872-1936), a pioneer of limnology in Italy, and Edgardo Baldi (1899-1951), the first director of the Institute. This collection is a cornerstone of more than a century of scientific research in limnology, which also benefitted from frequent international contacts with scientists and ecological associations. The reorganization of the material in the Historical Archive was planned in consultation with the Soprintendenza Archivistica of the Piedmont Region, which is the legal authority responsible for the public archives in the Piedmont Region. Beginning in 2012, the information contained in the Archive has been digitized using the software xDams, an open version software source of Regesta?. In 2014, part of the digitized material was made available on the web site: http://www.ise.cnr.it/archivio. These activities were conducted thanks to the contribution of the Fondazione Cassa Risparmio di Torino and Fondazione Comunitaria VCO, which funded two temporary staff for the reorganisation of the Historical Archive, including the physical preservation and digitalisation of the documents. These activities are part of the CNR mission within the European Digital Agenda, and the CNR contribution to the development of scientific thought

A new insight into the Stygofauna Mundi: assembling a global dataset for aquatic fauna in subterranean environments

The potential of subterranean environments as models to address major evolutionary and ecological questions has been highlighted in the literature. They represent partially isolated, discrete units offering several replicates of the same evolutionary processes. Species occurrence data of these environments is abundant, although sparse in the literature or gathered in databases established according to regional, taxonomical, or ecological criteria. We here present a newly assembled dataset consisting of records of aquatic animals in all types of caves or wells from all over the world. Literature sources were gathered from Google Scholar by independently searching for each metazoan phylum/arthropod order, as well as the key words “cave”, “groundwater”, “well”, or “stygobite”, in English, Galician, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalonian, French, Italian, Hungarian, Greek, German, Polish, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian. The relevance of each source was confirmed after checking the title and the abstract. For each selected source, we examined its reference list in order to identify studies that were not published in journals indexed in the databases we searched. From the 6852 selected references, we manually extracted all records that concerned either occurrence of a species in a given geographical area or occurrence of any taxon in a particular cave or well. Records were classified as primary or secondary, depending on whether they provided new information or referred to already publish records, allowing us to identify redundant information in posterior analyses. Information for each access point was organized in as a gazetteer, including synonym names, geographical, ecological, and geological information. Following this strategy, we have obtained 48,800 records (32,769, primary) from 1957 references checked so far. Most records are amongst fish and crustaceans. In contrast, few data exist for other groups that are comparatively diverse outside caves, such as Nematoda. Relevant information will be included in World Register of Marine Cave Species (Fig. 1)