The Italian natural history museums are facing a critical situation, due to the progressive loss of scientific relevance, decreasing economic investments, and scarcity of personnel. This is extremely alarming, especially for ensuring the long-term preservation of the precious collections they host. Moreover, a commitment in fieldwork to increase scientific collections and concurrent taxonomic research are rarely considered priorities, while most of the activities are addressed to public events with political payoffs, such as exhibits, didactic meetings, expositions, and talks. This is possibly due to the absence of a national museum that would have better steered research activities and overall concepts for collection management. We here propose that Italian natural history museums collaborate to instate a “metamuseum”, by establishing a reciprocal interaction network aimed at sharing budgetary and technical resources, which would assure better coordination of common long-term goals and scientific activities.

The European stag beetle Lucanus cervus, widely distributed across Europe and in some Near East countries, is one of the best known coleopteran\ud species listed in the European Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC and it is considered a flagship species for conservation of saproxylic fauna. Lucanus tetraodon\ud is a closely related species whose geographical distribution is still poorly known and debated. The two species have a sympatric occurrence in\ud central Italy, and in some localities of these areas, many individuals show a mosaic of morphological traits that makes species assignment nearly\ud impossible. We used both mitochondrial and nuclear markers to analyse these specimens. The mitochondrial results evidenced that the two species represent\ud well-defined genetic entities with mitochondrial DNA introgression. This pattern could be the result of either hybridization or of a convergence\ud of morphological characters under local selective pressures in areas of sympatric occurrence. The nuclear marker was polymorphic across the two\ud species and therefore did not reveal hybridization, even if many are the supports to this phenomenon. The most plausible explanation for this genetic\ud pattern is a very recent divergence of the two species which share a common origin and thus a common wg genotype

The taxonomy of stag beetles (Coleoptera: Lucanidae) remains challenging, mainly due to the sexual dimorphism and the strong allometry in males. Such conjecture confounds taxonomic based conservation efforts that are urgently needed due to numerous threats to stag beetle biodiversity. Molecular tools could help solve the problem of identification of the different recognized taxa in the “Lucanus cervus complex” and in some related Palaearctic species. We investigated the potential use of a 670 bp region at the 3’ end of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I gene (COI) for barcoding purposes (different from the standard COI barcoding region). Well resolved species and subspecies were L. tetraodon, L. cervusakbesianus, L. c. laticornis, as well as the two eastern Asian outgroup taxa L. formosanus and L. hermani. Conversely, certain taxa could not be distinguished from each other based on K2P-distances and tree topologies: L. c. fabiani / L. (P.) barbarossa, L. c. judaicus / an unknown Lucanus species, L. c. cervus / L. c. turcicus / L. c. pentaphyllus / L. (P.) macrophyllus / L. ibericus. The relative roles of phenotypic plasticity, recurrent hybridisation and incomplete lineage sorting underlying taxonomic and phylogenetic discordances are discussed.

Introduction of alien species is one of the major threats to aquatic biota and knowledge of the major correlates of their occurrence is pivotal in planning reliable conservation strategies.To understand whether specific freshwater habitats are more likely to be invaded than others, a dataset on the occurrence of 1604 species in 54 taxonomic groups from 181 sites across the Italian peninsula was gathered.The EUNIS habitat classification was used, selecting for the study's seven habitat types at the second EUNIS level, including lentic (EUNIS C1; 64 sites), lotic (EUNIS C2; 99 sites) and highly artificial (EUNIS J5; 18 sites) habitats.The aim of the study was to test whether the overall number of alien species and the proportion of alien species for each taxonomic group differed between habitat types and could be explained by environmental, human‐mediated, or climatic factors.Using generalized linear mixed effect models to account for potential confounding factors, only average air temperature of the site was a significant positive predictor of the occurrence of alien species, regardless of habitat type, species richness, and other climatic variables.A direct effect of temperature could be excluded given the origin of alien species, mostly from colder areas than Italy. Thus, an indirect effect could be hypothesized at the Italian latitudes, with warmer areas potentially more likely to be visited by tourists than colder areas. If this hypothesis is confirmed, the results of the analyses call for a compromise between the maintenance of recreational activities in the wild and the preservation of a natural environment to prevent the arrival and spread of alien species. On the other hand, no further recommendations can be implemented regarding habitat susceptibility to alien species. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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