Annotated checklist of the beetles of beech forests in Matese National Park, Central Italy

The checklist contains 165 species of beetles which belong to 37 families. The species were collected during a field study carried out in the year 2018 and aimed at describing the community of beetles. The collection methods consisted of window flight traps. The study activities were carried out in four distinct beech forest stands based on their altitude (High and Low) and exposure (South and North) and located in the Italian Central Apennines. The sites are included in the Natura 2000 site IT 7222287 “La Gallinola - Monte Miletto - Monti del Matese” and Matese National Park.

The checklist is annotated with information on the taxonomy of the species (order and family), number of individuals, geographic position, habitat type (following EUNIS habitat classification 2017), sampling protocol, collector name, specialist name, IUCN Red List categories of the saproxylic species (Carpaneto et al. 2015). 

The terms used for the dataset fields follows the Darwin Core Maintenance Group. 2020. List of Darwin Core terms. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). https://dwc.tdwg.org/list/

The discovery of a new species of beetle (Elateridae) for the Italian fauna was based on this dataset (Parisi et al., 2020).

The harmonization of the dataset to the point of view of taxa, authorship, LSID and the massive upgrading of the related identifiers in Zenodo record was performed by the use of R script using respectively dplyr, taxize (Chamberlain and Szöcs, 2013) and zen4r (Blondel and Barde, 2020) packages.