Historical data on the marine benthic fauna of Emilia-Romagna at the beginning of the twentieth century

This dataset includes the (first) quantitative data on the marine macrobenthic invertebrates which colonized the marine area extending from the Po River Mouth to the Gabicce promontory. They have been collected during the 1930s and were published in the late 1940s’ (Vatova, A., 1949, La fauna bentonica dell'alto e medio Adriatico. Nova Thalassia I(3): 1-110, therefore “Vatova”). In the present dataset, the information from Vatova were extracted, checked, updated and digitalized. It consists in four CSV files (UTF-8): Sampling Sites, Taxonomy, Abundance (ind sample^-1), Wet Biomass (g sample^-1) The CSV file “Sampling Sites” represents the list of 55 sites off the Emilia-Romagna coast which were examined by Vatova: their original name is indicated in the field “locationID”. For each site, the date of sample collection, its depth (in meters), the type of sediment (in Italian, as reported by Vatova), the sampler, the sampling area and the number of replicates deduced by the Vatova paper were included in the fields “eventDate”, “maximumDepthInMeters”, “habitat”, “sampler”, “samplingAreaInSqrtMeters” and “replicas”, respectively. Moreover, the number of the table in which this information was provided in the original work of Vatova was added in the field “VatovaTable”. Finally, the coordinates of each site derived from the examination of Vatova map, and the reference frame were provided in the fields “decimalLatitude”, “decimalLongitude” and “geodeticDatum”, respectively. Taxonomic related information for each taxon, extracted from the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS; https://marinespecies.org/), is provided in the CSV file “Taxonomy” (Table 1). The original name used by Vatova was also included in the field “ScientificName_Vatova” Table 1. Provided taxonomic information. Taxon the name used in the dataset ScientificName_accepted the name accepted according to WoRMS AphiaID Unique identifier in WoRMS Kingdom Taxonomic level Phylum Taxonomic level Class Taxonomic level Order Taxonomic level Family Taxonomic level Genus Taxonomic level Subgenus Taxonomic level Species Taxonomic level The CSV file “Abundance (ind sample^-1)” contains the list of species in the field “ScientificName_accepted”. For each species we included the counts observed in each site in the corresponding fields. Similarly, the CSV file “Wet Biomass (g sample^-1)” contains the weight (in grams) of the species found in each sample. The sea bottom off the Emilia-Romagna coast have been investigated by Vatova in 1934 (July 19-31) in 1935 (July 6-24). Unfortunately, the sieving of samples and collection of organisms, which were performed on board the ship, likely affected the abundance of small organisms. The communities described by Vatova are thus not directly comparable to those found today. However, this information is valuable because it dates to a period before the economic and tourist development of the Romagna coastal area. The spatial distribution of species which were present in the 1930s may be useful for assessing any changes attributable to current or past human activity.