ITV-net: leveraging intraspecific trait variability to bridge vegetation science and trait-based research in Italy

Vegetation science is a branch of community ecology that relies on species identities and abundance to classify vegetation in coherent units and to explore species coexistence and turnover dynamics. The advent of trait-based ecology has expanded vegetation science, providing a framework that allows for a better understanding of plant strategies and the functional structure of communities. These complementary disciplines have remained largely independent among Italian plant ecologists. Therefore, in 2021, we launched the ITV-net initiative, a national collaborative effort for bringing together vegetation plots and field-measured plant trait data to develop a national platform that can serve both vegetation and trait-based ecologists. In the first data call, we were able to gather trait data on two key leaf traits (i.e., Leaf Area and Specific Leaf Area) for >700 species across 1,043 georeferenced vegetation plots, complemented with species relative abundances, across eight different EUNIS habitat types. Despite this remarkable first milestone, we aim to enlarge the scope of this initiative to include more vegetation plots and functional traits across more habitat types in Italy. Here, we provide an overview of the ITV-net initiative and its underlying methodological details as a ‘manifesto’ to spread the data call to other potential contributors in the Italian community of plant ecologists. Our ultimate objective is to bridge the vegetation science and trait-based ecological research in Italy towards developing a national database of vegetation plots and plant functional traits. We believe this effort will contribute to building a solid network among Italian plant ecologists to cross the artificial boundaries of different, yet complementary, disciplines.