The new Checklist of the Italian Fauna: Formicidae

I present the updated version of the ‘Checklist of the Italian Fauna’ for what concerns ants (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Formicidae), which is part of the broader effort to produce an updated comprehensive checklist of the Italian fauna about 25 years after the first edition. The present list is the fourth Italian checklist of ants to be published since 1916, and refers to the state of art on November 2020. A simplified version of the data set is available as a supplementary file to this paper, while the full data set will be accessible in a regularly updated form from the LifeWatch Italy Data Portal (https://dataportal.lifewatchitaly.eu/data). Compared to the previous list by Poldi and others, published in 1995, the new one contains changes retrieved from 86 literature sources, including 17 published between 1921 and 1995 (which were missed in the previous checklist) and 69 published from 1996 to 2020. These references add 50 new species, including 9 new endemic species, as well as 68 nomenclatural changes and 88 distribution novelties at the regional level to the previous checklist. A total of 267 species and subspecies belonging to 7 ant subfamilies and 42 genera are part of the new list. The knowledge of the Italian ant fauna is rapidly improving on several fronts, and such dynamism is well-testified by the several novelties from 10 articles published after this dataset was compiled, to be included in the first future update of the on-line checklist. A further new list with extensive comments, detailed species distribution and biogeographic consideration will be desirable as soon as the situation stabilizes.