The LTER site Gulf of Venice and the project RITMARE: a case study for the recovery, search, view and sharing of long term ecological marine research data

The need for ecological knowledge synthesis and availability, with an open science perspective, requires the application of good information management approaches, providing the capacity to discover, access, interpret, process and distribute data. Access to information both reliable and interoperable among different providers is essential to address key environmental challenges, most of them requiring analyses of long-term trends, identification of drivers and provision of options for mitigation and adaptation. To this purpose, a collective effort among producers of ecological data, information managers and users (in science, policy and business) is needed. Within this general and relevant context, that is driving many processes, initiatives and projects at the European and global level, practical examples of collaboration are needed.. In this work we present a case study, resulting from the cooperation between marine LTER (Long Term Ecological Research) ecologists working in one of the LTER-Italy sites (the Gulf of Venice), extended from the northern Adriatic areas to the south of the Po delta river, and the data manager group working in the national flagship project RITMARE. The process of data mining and harmonization concerned 50 years (1965-2015) of observations on pelagic abiotic factors and phytoplankton in the Gulf of Venice. The information on this database is made available, for discovery and access, by the suite software Get-It StarterKit , developed by CNR within the project RITMARE specifically for the marine community. The relevant results, opportunities and weaknesses of this cooperation as well as the main implications for the wider LTER and marine community are illustrated, together with some examples of the management of this long-term dataset developed within the RITMARE SP7.