Annotated checklist of the beetles of three beech forests in Gran Sasso National Park, Central Italy

The checklist contains 163 species of beetles which belong to 36 families. The species were collected during a field study carried out in the years 2013 and 2016 and aimed at describing the community of beetles. The collection methods consisted of window flight traps and emergence traps. The study area included 3 beech forest sites, named Prati di Tivo (42.5096 N, 13.5679 E), Venacquaro (42.4988 N, 13.5139 E) and Incodara (42.5123 N, 13.4735 E) located in the Italian Central Apennines. The sites are included in the Natura 2000 site IT7110202 “Gran Sasso”. The checklist is annotated with information on the taxonomy of the species (order and family), number of individuals, locality, habitat type (following EUNIS habitat classification 2017), sampling protocol, collector name, specialist name, IUCN Red List categories of the saproxylic species (Carpaneto et al. 2015). The terms used for the dataset fields follows the Darwin Core Maintenance Group. 2020. List of Darwin Core terms. Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG). https://dwc.tdwg.org/list/ Investigations on stand structure and forest biodiversity (Sabatini et al. 2016) and faunistic analysis (Zanetti and Parisi 2019) have been based on this dataset. The harmonization of the dataset to the point of view of taxa, authorship, LSID and the massive upgrading of the related identifiers in Zenodo record was performed by the use of R script using respectively dplyr, taxize (Chamberlain and Szöcs, 2013) and zen4r (Blondel and Barde, 2020) packages.The species collection was funded under the Project LIFE11 NAT/IT/000135 FAGUS "Forests of the Apennines: Goodpractices to conjugate Use and Sustainability