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The DiSSCo consortium in
SWEDEN
Eight institutions are currently participating in the DiSSCo project. These include the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, the Gothenburg Museum of Natural History, the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, the Bergius Botanic Garden in Stockholm, and university-associated collections and museums in Gothenburg, Lund, Umeå, and Uppsala. They hold about 40 million specimens, handle more than 20,000 loans annually, and welcome about 600 guest scientists each year.
Swedish Museum of Natural History
Being the largest natural history museum in Sweden, the collections hold more than 12 million specimens and growing through donations, acquisitions, and active research of about 60 full time researchers. Asides from large collections of Swedish specimens and a focus on Polar Regions (both Arctic and Antarctic), it houses specimens from all over the world. It is visited by ~250 guest researchers annually, about 10,000 specimens go on loan each year, and the museum is responsible for the daily national pollen forecast and bird ringing. The museum acts as the National Task Force leader for DiSSCo, the Swedish GBIF node, and is also an active participant in the EU-projects SYNTHESYS+, CETAF and COST.
Bergius Botanic Garden
With a history stretching back to the 18th century, the primary objective of the Bergius Botanic Garden is to support teaching and research about plant diversity. The herbarium originates from the collections by Peter Jonas Bergius (1730-1790), a disciple of Linnaeus. In addition to the historical collection of about 17,000 sheets, it holds ca 75,000 sheets of cultivated plants and Scandinavian vascular plants.
Gothenburg Botanical Garden
Opened in 1923, the Gothenburg Botanical Garden now receives about 500,000 visitors per year and hosts around 16,000 different living plant species. Its research aims to describe and understand plant diversity, with a focus on plants species richness in tropical America. This knowledge is used to understand possible impacts of future changes (e.g. global warming) on biological diversity.
Gothenburg University, Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences
Gothenburg University hosts the Botanical Garden’s herbarium since 1961. This collection dates back to late 18th century and includes approximately 1 million herbarium specimens. It includes extensive collections from the Nordic countries, as well as from tropical South America, resulting from more than 50 years of research activities in this area.
Gothenburg Museum of Natural History
The museum was established in 1833 and now hosts more than 10 million specimens of vertebrates, invertebrates, rocks and fossils in its collection, including about 2000 type specimens. About 5% of these are digitized and searchable online, including all vertebrate specimens. The library holds nearly 80,000 books, most of which are about zoology.
Lund University, Biological Museum
During the last three centuries, the Biological Museum of Lund University has assembled c. 12 million specimens, including the second oldest insect collection in the world. There are about 2.5 million plant specimens, of which 34% are databased, and the insect collection includes 3.8 million databased specimens. The type collection includes approximately 150 vertebrates and 1,400 invertebrates.
Umeå University, Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences
With about 300,000 plant specimens collected since 1846, the herbarium at Umeå University is the smallest of Sweden’s five research herbaria. The focus is on plants from northern Sweden, and around 35% of the collection is databased.
Uppsala University, Museum of Evolution
The collections housed in the Museum of Evolution date from the mid-1700s and have been expanded by the scientists of Uppsala University ever since. It hosts more than 4.5 million specimens including some 3.2 million plant specimens, about 40,000 minerals, 300,000 fossils including a large historical collection of Chinese fossils, and 1 million zoological specimens including types of Linné.
Participating institutions in
Sweden
Everything on one screen
Collection Dashboard
The dashboard you can see below contains data on the collections of natural science institutions across Europe. Page one shows the approximate number of collections per category for all of the 89 institutes who participated in an initial DiSSCo survey and page two the national contributions to the European collection. The selection boxes allow filtering for country and institutions. The data in this dashboard is populated with information as sent by the DiSSCo partners through an initial survey in November 2017 and should therefore be considered as preliminary. Following that survey, we went through a rigorous process of identifying obvious errors and contacting individuals to correct those. Nevertheless it will probably still contain some errors and information might be outdated. Please contact Niels Raes if you detect any issues so the data can be updated.
If you would like to see a full screen version of the dashboard, please click here.