Managing FAIR Research Products for Biodiversity and Ecosystems Within the LifeWatch Italy Infrastructure

Biodiversity and ecosystem services are declining at an alarming rate, a trend expected to intensify due to human-induced climate change. Addressing this crisis requires comprehensive data collection and integration. However, the digital outputs resulting from the research lifecycle are often fragmented and heterogeneous. Combining these research products can yield new insights, but only if they are made Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, i.e. FAIR. Adherence to FAIR principles ensures that data and digital outputs can be integrated and reused by both humans and machines. In this context, national infrastructures are key in supporting the generation and management of FAIR digital outputs. This paper presents the LifeWatch Italy digital infrastructure, a national initiative developed to support the FAIR management of digital research products within the ecology domain. LifeWatch Italy aims to provide services and platforms that address key stages of the research data lifecycle, including data collection, curation, annotation, publication, and reuse. A suite of integrated platforms enables structured data ingestion, semantic annotation using controlled vocabularies and ontologies, taxonomic validation via national and international backbones, and publication in standardised, open formats. Interoperability is achieved through the adoption of widely accepted community standards, persistent identifiers, and automated workflows that ease the burden on individual researchers, ensuring that all the digital products meet FAIR principles by default. The infrastructure aspires to have a key role as national hub for biodiversity and ecosystem research in Italy, supporting the scientific community, and ensuring long-term usability of research outputs.