Published this month in Arctic Science, a special issue on Arctic museum collections highlights how natural history museums are more than “cabinets of curiosities.” Arctic collections are biodiversity and cultural repositories that help monitor rapidly changing ecosystems, preserve cultural heritage, and enhance public engagement in science and culture.
The special issue entitled “Arctic Museum collections: Documenting and understanding changes in biological and cultural diversity through time and space” brings together multi-national teams of researchers to discuss a range of topics including the development of museum programs in partnership with Indigenous communities, the preservation of cultural media archives, and the urgent need to sample Arctic specimens given unprecedented climatic change.
We invite you to share this open access special issue widely and tell us how museums have impacted your research. Join the conservation on Twitter or Facebook.
—
Special Issue Preface by Guest Editor, Stefanie Ickert-Bond
Future directions and priorities for Arctic bryophyte research by Lily Lewis, Stefanie Ickert-Bond, Elisabeth Biersma, Peter Convey, Bernard Goffinet, Kristian Hassel, Hans Kruijer et al.
The value of museums in the production, sharing, and use of entomological data to document hyperdiversity of the changing North by Derek Sikes, Matthew Bowser, Kathryn Daly, Toke Høye, Sarah Meierotto, Logan Mullen, Jozef Slowik, and Jill Stockbridge
Collectively, we need to accelerate Arctic specimen sampling by Kevin Winker and Jack Withrow
Finnish botanists and mycologists in the Arctic by Henry Väre
The Greenland vascular plant herbarium of the University of Copenhagen by Christian Bay, Fred Daniëls, and Geoffrey Halliday
Biodiversity databases in Russia: towards a national portal by Natalya Ivanova and Maxim Shashkov
Additions to the lichenized fungi biota of North America and Alaska from collections held in the University of Alaska Museum of the North herbarium by Alan Fryday
The Beringian Coevolution Project: holistic collections of mammals and associated parasites reveal novel perspectives on evolutionary and environmental change in the North by Joseph Cook, Kurt Galbreath, Kayce Bell, Mariel Campbell, Suzanne Carrière, Jocelyn Colella, Natalie Dawson et al.
Museum cultural collections: pathways to the preservation of traditional and scientific knowledge by Angela Linn, Joshua Reuther, Chris Wooley, Scott Shirar, and Jason Rogers
Arctic science education using public museum collections from the University of Alaska Museum: an evolving and expanding landscape by Katherine Anderson, Ute Kaden, Patrick Druckenmiller, Sarah Fowell, Mark Spangler, Falk Huettmann, and Stefanie Ickert-Bond
Worth a thousand words: visual collections and a long view of the North by Leonard Kamerling
