Services

The LifeWatch Alien Species Virtual Research Environment (Alien Species VRE) has been built and equipped in order to developing systems that support the scientist's work for experimental researches on alien species arrival and spread into different types of ecosystems (aquatic and terrestrial).

The Alien Species VRE is an example of the types of scientific studies that researchers on biodiversity and alien species could undertake.

The goal is to obtain a list of capabilities on the topic to be shared through the LifeWatch portal with all those interested in alien and invasive species.

Alien and Invasive Species

Alien Species VRE Services

Ecosystem vulnerability to invasive and alien species: 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;
  • the selection of the best fitting model;
  • the plot of the rarefaction curves on the reshaped dataset.

Alien Species Thesaurus: it is an initiative to deal with the semantics about alien and invasive species. It has been developed and published by LifeWatch Italy and it is based on already existing glossaries created within the framework of international initiatives aimed at the study of alien and invasive species. The Thesaurus currently consists of about 160 terms.