A FAIR and open geographic data collection for the Massaciuccoli Lake basin wetland in Italy

The creation of a catalogue of geodata harmonised over time and space is essential for describing the status of ecosystem services in wetlands. In the present work, a specific methodology has been developed for the collection and generation of spatially and temporally harmonized geographic data to describe essential ecological and socio-economic charactesristics of the Massaciuccoli Lake basin (Tuscany, Italy), while providing a re-usable methodology for other areas. We developed a methodology, which we called 'Geodata Layers Harmonization Methodology' (GLHM), divided into four main phases: Geodata Census (GC), Geodata Selection (GS), Geodata Alignment (GA), and Geodata Publication (GP). The first phase, GC, involved a census of geodata made available online by public institutions, prioritizing those most relevant for describing ecosystem services, such as climatic, agro-environmental, pedo-geological, and biodiversity variables, with a preference for detailed data at the local level. The metadata of the collected geodata were organized into a structured tabular format. In the GS phase, geodata were selected based on a spatial resolution compatible with regional-scale ecological models (maximum 0.0005° ≈ 50 m), and a temporal coverage that could represent from remote past to far future scenarios. Geodata with partial spatial coverage or unsuitable for ecological models were excluded. Additionally, we evaluated the compliance of the geodata published on the websites of public institutions with the Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable (FAIR) principles through a newly developed scoring system. Based on this score, we selected only the data that exceeded a minimum FAIRness threshold. In the GA phase, the selected geodata were aligned semantically (i.e., by variable meaning), temporally, and spatially. Each geodata was georeferenced using the WGS84/EPSG:4326 reference system and clipped to the boundaries of the Massaciuccoli Lake basin. Raster data were resampled to achieve a uniform spatial resolution of 0.0005°. In the last phase, GP, the aligned geodata were published on public access repositories and services: The entire collection was organized as a QGIS project with legends and a metadata table associated. An Atlas was also produced, in PDF format, which visually represented the data and metadata. The geodata and their corresponding legends were exposed through Web Map Service (WMS) and Web feature Service (WFS) standards on a GeoServer instance and catalogued in a GeoNetwork instance, compliant with the ISO19139 standard and the INSPIRE European Directive. The collection contains 148 geo-datasets, representing 75 climatic, agro-environmental, pedo-geological, morphological, ecological, biological, and socio-economic information distributed across five temporal reference time frames: a remote past (1950-1980), a near past (1981-2015), the present (2016-2024), a near future (2025-2050), and a far future (2051-2100). Future projections are available under the Representative Concentration Pathways (RPC) 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5 to simulate low, medium, and high greenhouse gas concentration scenarios respectively. The present geodata collection is particularly useful for wetland monitoring, management and planning. It can easily be integrated with ecological models and predictive studies to analyse the effects of climate change and anthropogenic pressures on wetlands. The GLHM methodology is applicable to other ecological contexts to create standardised structured frameworks for evaluating the status of the biodiversity and the ecosystem services and the interplay between anthropic pressures and the ecosystem response.