Swedish Malaise Trap Project
Station Linné
Description
The Swedish Malaise Trap Project (SMTP), funded by the Swedish Species Information Centre (ArtDatabanken), is a Station Linnés owned project. It aims to provide species determinations for all the 20 million insect specimens obtained from Malaise traps sampling at a wide range of landscapes and habitats. This would deliver an important and necessary contribution to a fundamental objective of the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative (STI): to present descriptions of all Swedish multicellular species that can be identified without advanced techniques in an encyclopedia on the Swedish flora and fauna (Nationalnyckeln). Specimens from the SMTP traps, collected continuously over a three-year period (2003-2006) represent a gold-mine for biodiversity studies. Qualitative and quantitative analyses have benefited from SMTP trap samples, particularly during recent morphological and molecular systematics research involving Swedish insect species. To date, hundreds of species previously unknown to science has been discovered in these samples, and new localities in Sweden have been verified for a multitude of additional species. One essential challenge is to increase accessibility to this material while establishing new contacts for further scientific discovery. Progress in identification is spurred by taxonomic workshops, and specimen-level data capture is facilitated by sending standardized excel-sheets to the specialists. Incoming data will be integrated into the DINA collection management system and will be made available through the Swedish LifeWatch infrastructure. Selected specimens will be stored for future large-scale molecular bar-coding of the Swedish insect fauna, either dry-mounted or in 96% ethanol at low temperature. We estimate that the SMTP material contains at least half the species of Swedish insects, possibly considerably more, which means that this material provides a unique opportunity for cost-effective barcoding of a substantial fraction of the Swedish biota.
Taxonomic range
Kingdoms covered include: Animalia.
Geographic range
Sweden
Number of specimens in the collection
Click the Records & Statistics tab to access those database records that are available through the atlas.
Metadata last updated on 2023-03-30 13:30:32.0
Digitised records available through the Atlas
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can be accessed through the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure
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