A georeferenced dataset of Italian occurrence records of the phylum Rotifera

We report a dataset of known and published occurrence records of Italian taxa from species (and subspecies) to family rank of the phylum Rotifera; we considered only Bdelloidea, Monogononta, and Seisonacea, and did not include Acanthocephala. The dataset includes 15,525 records (12,015 of which with georeferenced coordinates) of 584 valid species and subspecies names and other taxa at family level, gathered from 332 published papers. The published literature spans the period from 1838 to 2022, with the lowest number of papers published during the first half of the twentieth century, followed by an increasing number of papers, from 20 to more than 60 in each decade. The Italian regions with the highest number of records and species are Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and Piedmont, whereas no records are known for Molise. The number of species known from each region mostly mirrors sampling efforts, measured as the number of publications per region. The dataset is available through the Open Science Framework (OSF), and all the georeferenced occurrence data have been uploaded to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).