Authors: Campanaro, Alessandro; Gisondi, Silvia;Blandino, Cristina;Lenzi , Alice;

Species and habitats listed in the EU Habitats Directive (HD) have not been widely targeted by citizen science projects even though these species require major monitoring and conservation efforts. The use of volunteers could increase the amount of distributional data on these target species, resulting in a better definition of the species conservation status as required by HD national reports. Results from InNat, a 6-years citizen science initiative (born under the LIFE MIPP project and continued under Italian National fundings), targeting protected neglected species and habitats, are presented here. This initiative has involved more than 1.400 volunteers, gathering over 6.000 records. The potential of citizen science for the monitoring of protected species and habitats is here addressed: analyses show a yearly increment of volunteers and records as well as a growth of spatial data coverage for the target species. In this context, the distributional pattern of the records for the given period has been investigated, focusing on the influence of different factors (e.g., proximity to infrastructures or protected areas, human population density).