Lista Rossa degli Insetti Ortotteroidei Italiani
The Red List of Italian Orthopteroid Insects (LiRIO) is an ongoing project dedicated to assessing and monitoring the conservation status of orthopteroid insects found in Italy. The platform brings together assessments of the orders: Orthoptera, Mantodea, Blattodea, Phasmatodea, Embioptera, and Dermaptera into a single database, with the goal of creating a shared, transparent, and updatable national resource. Orthopteroid insects (Polyneoptera) are a large group comprising over 450 species in Italy; they are essential for the maintenance of natural ecosystems and serve as effective bioindicators of environmental conditions and biodiversity.
The assessments currently available represent an initial, preliminary overview generated by ARGOS, an experimental algorithm developed as a tool to support species assessment and trained on the official IUCN Red Lists. ARGOS integrates and analyzes georeferenced data and other available indicators in a standardized form, producing an initial automated assessment of the conservation status and key parameters associated with distribution and risk. The result is assessments compatible with official IUCN red lists, adapting the IUCN criteria and measuring the confidence in the results to provide red lists that are highly reliable, verifiable, and directly applicable in conservation projects.
Automation is not intended to replace the judgment of specialists. On the contrary, LiRIO is designed as a participatory platform, where initial assessments can be progressively reviewed, validated, and, when necessary, corrected and updated by the scientific community. For this reason, the database tracks the origin of each assessment, distinguishing automated outputs from subsequent expert reviews.
The public database allows users to access essential information for each taxon, including the proposed conservation category, endemism, the presence of alien species, key distribution parameters, and information on the origin and date of the assessment. More technical information and supporting data, on the other hand, are intended for consultation and review by accredited specialists.
LiRIO is therefore designed as a dynamic resource, serving citizens, scientists, technicians and evaluators, in which computational tools, open data, and taxonomic and ecological expertise work together to build and continuously improve our understanding of the conservation status of Italian orthopteroid insects.
Become a LiRIO Reviewer
LiRIO is a collaborative project: the preliminary assessments produced by ARGOS can be reviewed, validated, re-examined, and updated by specialists with documented expertise in taxonomy and ecology.
If you are a specialist in Orthotteroid insects and would like to contribute to the review of LiRIO assessments, you can submit your application. Applications will be evaluated by the project’s scientific coordination team, and if approved, you will be granted access to the reviewers’ portal.
© 2026 Museo di Archeologia e Scienze Naturali “G. Zannato” – LiRIO. Scientific project of the Zannato Museum. Concept and development: Roberto Battiston. The platform’s content is intended for consultation, study, research, and scientific dissemination. When using or citing data, please cite the source and the LiRIO project. The assessments are a work in progress and subject to revision and updating. Recommended citation: Battiston R. (2026). LiRIO – Red List of Italian Orthotteroid Insects, version 0.9. Museo di Archeologia e Scienze Naturali “G. Zannato”. www.museozanato.it/LiRIO (accessed dd/mm/yyyy).