Making data management practices compliant with Essential Variables frameworks: A practical approach in the marine biological domain

Measuring marine biodiversity is essential to proper management of biological resources. Monitoring networks and observatory systems are adopting conceptual frameworks to agree on the fundamental variables describing the biodiversity change and to meaningfully inform policy makers. Biological and ecosystem Essential Ocean Variables (bio-eco EOVs) and Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs) both help to harmonize observations of different providers to essential measurements. Conceptual relationships between the two frameworks have been recently outlined to enrich data with complementary information. However, even if bio-eco EOVs and EBVs are adopted among research communities, they represent theoretical approaches whose implementations are often limited and still uncoupled. To evaluate operative reuse of biodiversity measurements, in this paper we identify differences and common aspects between the management recommendations established by the two frameworks in a synoptic comparison. Also, we provide evidences for applying the proposed approach to the marine component of the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) networks, by individuating in the Italian network (LTER-Italy) the Northern Adriatic Sea as a case study where compare, in further work, the data handling practices with the identified recommendations.