Checklist and distribution of the italian fauna. 10,000 terrestrial and inland water species | Memorie del Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Verona 15 The project CKmap The assessment of Italian faunal resources was requested by the Italian Ministry for the Environment and Territory with the goal of identifying those areas essential for the preservation of Italian fauna. The first step of this work was the publication of the Checklist of the species of the Ital- ian fauna (Minelli et al., 1993-95), followed by the project Checklist and distribution of the Italian fauna developed by the Civic Museum of Natural History of Verona (by Sandro Ruffo, Fabio Stoch, Leonardo Latella), which last- ed three years (1999-2001) and included the convention Completion of the knowledge (module C) with the Italian Botanical Society, carried out by the Department of Ecol- ogy of the University of Calabria (by Pietro Brandmayr), which added the distribution of another 3,500 species of vertebrates and invertebrates. Species selection criteria The group of species selected was represented, at the end of the project, by more than 10,000 species of terres- trial and inland water invertebrates, which were chosen by screening the Checklist (Stoch, 2004). The following criteria, following Pearson (1995), were adopted when choosing the taxonomic groups: • groups studied by professional and experienced tax- onomists; • groups which included species with well-known dis- tribution over the entire country; • groups which included both species with restricted habitats and small areals, and species with wide dis- tribution; • groups which included species with areals that do not change with time; • groups with a well-established taxonomy, and few synonymies. On the basis of these criteria the taxonomic groups were selected; for each of these groups a subgroup of species was then chosen. One of the requisites for the realiza- tion of the project was, when possible, the inclusion of all the species belonging to the selected groups: in this way any subjective choice which could have biased any subsequent statistical analysis was avoided. Specialists were chosen trying to use first the authors of the Checklist (MInelli et al., 1993-95) and, second, using other specialists available. Each of them discussed the choice of taxa and organised the data analysis with the project coordinators. The project CKmap (Checklist and distribution of the Italian fauna): methods and informatical techniques Leonardo Latella, Sandro Ruffo, Fabio Stoch Collection of ecological and distributional data Data were obtained from literature, from museums and private collections, and from direct observations. Sixty- eight specialists were in charge of filling the data-files; they in turn cooperated with other specialists, both pro- fessionals and amateurs, in order to present the most updated species distribution in Italy. The specialists’ data files were written in MS Access®, MS Excel®, or as ASCII, for PC or Mac. All the specialists provided three data tables: the Species table is a revision of the Check- list of each given group (Minelli et al., 1993-95), includ- ing code, scientific name, author, notes (for species new for science and for Italy); data from the checklist were completed with distributional and autoecological data such as the chorotype (according to the classification by Vigna Taglianti et al., 1995, 1999), habitat, feeding habits, conservation status according to simplified IUCN categories, and value as bioindicators. The Stations table included, for each species, the list of collecting sites (re- gion, province, general and detailed location, elevation) and, for each location, the datum origin and the year of the most recent collection. The Sources table includes the literature that was analysed, or the collections that were examined. Database structure The database was entered on PC with operative system Windows 2000/XP and software MS Access® 2000. This kind of database is useful for databases not larger than 2 Gb; the capacity is large enough even for a fauna as rich as the Italian one. The database structure is very simple, so to execute research queries quickly. For this reason, the number of “key” tables is limited to the three tables provided by the specialists (Species, Stations, Sources), modified as necessary. The species table includes genus, species and subspecies, whereas the higher ranks (fam- ily, order, class, phylum) are included in a separate ta- ble (link based on the family code), in order to have a clearer structure. The code is hierarchical (three-digit for the phylum code, another three-digit for the class, and so on for lower ranks), allowing to easily select the species belonging to a higher taxon, and to reproduce the cor- rect taxonomic sequence using a tree structure, which is usually available in several Windows® programming languages. The distribution table includes, for each species, the localities given by the specialists, with coordinates,