Ájtte Collection

Göran Sjöberg1, Veronika Johansson2, Manash Shah3

1 Ájtte museum, Jokkmokk, Sweden; 2 Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden; 3 Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm, Sweden

Corresponding author(s): Göran Sjöberg (Goran.Sjoberg@ajtte.com), Veronika Johansson (veronika.johansson@nrm.se)

Received {date}; Revised {date}; Accepted {date}; Published {date}

Citation: Combination of authors, year of data paper publication (in parentheses), Title, Journal Name, Volume, Issue number (in parentheses), and doi of the data paper.

Resource Citation

Sjöberg G, Johansson V (2023). Ájtte Collection. Version 1.5. Ájtte Museum. Occurrence dataset. https://www.gbif.se/ipt/resource?r=ajtt-ajn&v=1.5

Abstract

Ájtte Museum is one of the museums in Sweden that actively works with the collection and preservation of natural history material. The purpose of the collection is to build a special collection with the overall heading: "nature of the mountains". The collected material includes birds, mammals, fish, fungi, minerals, rocks and botanicals. The material constituting the Natural history collections are donated by private persons, the police (“state wildlife”) and other museums and institutions. In addition, the museum also conducts its own active collection activities.

Currently, the museum holds over 19,000 natural history objects in its database /collection. The collections are searchable in the museum common database: http://collections.ajtte.com/  and thus accessible to researchers, students and other interested but also useful for educational purposes. 

The collections are stored in climate-controlled archives so that they can be preserved in a safe and secure way for the future. Our goal is that these unique collections will come to attention of the special interest researcher and be a resource to taxonomic and morphological studies on the species of Northern Sweden.

The insect collections are the largest part of the natural history collections of Ájtte museum, with more than 14,500 specimens, mainly including beetles and butterflies with a northern provenance. The beetles (Coleoptera) of this collection were donated by Sven-Erik Nilsson’s estate (2003). The butterflies (Lepidoptera) are from the Jokkmokk area and consists of approximately 1 200 specimens belonging to 400 different species, and was donated by Roger Engelmark (Professor Emeritus, University of Umeå).

The museum's collection of reindeers (Rangifer tarandus) is very extensive, perhaps the world's largest. The collection consists of osteological material with over 1 000 skulls, with antlers and jaws from both adult and young animals of both sexes. This well-documented material of reindeer has been collected from the whole Swedish range of distribution. The collection was previous held by the Swedish Museum of Natural History, but in 2010 it was taken over by Ájtte museum. The material was collected by the researcher Folke Skuncke during the middle of the 19th century.

Keywords: Occurrence, Specimen, Occurrence

Data published through GBIF: https://www.gbif.se/ipt/resource?r=ajtt-ajn

Taxonomic coverage

General taxonomic coverage description: The Ájtte Collection consist of mammals, birds, fish, insects, invertebrates, fungi, mosses, lichens and vascular plants.
Taxonomic ranks
Kingdom: Fungi, Plantae
Phylum: Bryophyta
Class: Mammalia, Aves, Pesces, Insecta
Common names: Mammals, Birds, Fish, Insects, Fungi, Moss, Plants

Spatial coverage

General spatial coverage: Specimens are mainly from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Austria and Gambia.
Coordinates: 90°0'0''S and 90°0'0''N Latitude; 180°0'0''W and 180°0'0''E Longitude 

Datasets

Dataset description
Object name: Darwin Core Archive Ájtte Collection
Character encoding: UTF-8
Format name: Darwin Core Archive format
Format version: 1.0
Distribution: https://www.gbif.se/ipt/archive.do?r=ajtt-ajn
Publication date of data: 2023-03-08
Language: Swedish
Licences of use: Public Domain (CC0 1.0)

Metadata language: English
Date of metadata creation: 2013-11-12
Hierarchy level: Dataset