Meteo-Hydrological Sensors within the Lake Maggiore Catchment: System Establishment, Functioning and Data Validation.

Climate change and human activities have a strong impact on lakes and their catchments, so to understand ongoing processes it is fundamental to monitor environmental variables with a spatially well-distributed and high frequency network and efficiently share data. An effective sharing and interoperability of environmental information between technician and end-user fosters an in-depth knowledge of the territory and its critical environmental issues. In this paper, we present the approaches and the results obtained during the PITAGORA project (Interoperable Technological Platform for Acquisition, Management and Organization of Environmental data, related to the lake basin). PITAGORA was aimed at developing both instruments and data management, including pre-processing and quality control of raw data to ensure that data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR principles). The main results show that the developed instrumentation is low-cost, easily implementable and reliable, and can be applied to the measurement of diverse environmental parameters such as meteorological, hydrological, physico-chemical, and geological. The flexibility of the solutions proposed make our system adaptable to different monitoring purposes, research, management, and civil protection. The real time access to environmental information can improve management of a territory and ecosystems, safety of the population, and sustainable socio-economic development.

Fish communities in Italian sub-alpine lakes: Non-native species and anthropogenic pressures increase community dissimilarities.

In European lakes, anthropogenic pressures have increased significantly since the 1950s, facilitating colonisation by non-native species and increasing the potential for further invasions. Here, we determined the effects of anthropogenic pressures (i.e., habitat alterations and introduction of non-native species) on the fish communities of Italian sub-alpine lakes. We hypothesised that established non-native species would have more competitive traits against anthropogenic stressors, such as habitat alteration, than native species. Thus, we expected that non-native species would dominate lake communities and reduce native species occurrence and abundance depending on the degree of anthropogenic alterations. Overall, we predicted that the increase in anthropogenic pressures after the 1950s had led to homogenisation of the fish communities of the lakes in the region. We tested these hypotheses using data on 15 sub-alpine lakes, covering a broad geographical and morphological gradient, and compared the 2007-2014 fish community composition (sampled according to the CEN protocol plus point-abundance electrofishing) with variables of lake habitat and anthropogenic pressures (based on the Lake Habitat Survey, a method to evaluate the hydromorphological conditions of lakes according to the European Water Framework Directive) and fish communities before 1950, the latter based on bibliographic information. Following our hypothesis, non-native species showed higher prevalence of traits that increase their competitiveness against anthropogenic alterations (e.g., tolerance to pollution). In addition to lake morphology, the community composition of non-native fish determined as abundance (NPUE) and biomass (BPUE) was positively related to anthropogenic pressures. Since the 1950s, 19 non-native species have colonised the Italian sub-alpine lakes, and the occurrence of native species has decreased by ~27%. However, contrary to our expectation, these changes have increased the ß-diversity of the fish communities in the lakes.