Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery Bulk Samples Collection

Like many museums, not all of our zoological material at TMAG is registered, sorted or identified to species level, since we also house many ‘bulk collections’. We use this term to cover material arising from short-term or long-term research projects, such as postgraduate student research and ecological monitoring programs. An individual bulk collection, therefore, might comprise a box of part-sorted pitfall-trap or flight intercept-trap samples from which only a single taxonomic group has been extracted; a series of jars of trawled bycatch; or multiple vials of freshwater arthropods from kick-sampling, sorted to ordinal level. Nearly all our collections are Tasmanian in origin or from the state’s adjacent waters. For our individual bulk-collection records on the Atlas of Living Australia, the datasetName and samplingProtocol fields, taken together, should give an indication of what to expect.

The key shared quality is that these bulk collections represent a potential goldmine for taxonomists and other researchers looking for sources of already-collected Tasmanian material to study. We encourage researchers to explore the range of bulk collections whose metadata we have made available here, and to contact us for further details of how to access any that are of particular interest. In most cases, this will involve arranging a visit to our Rosny Collections and Research Facility, where we can provide access to the material as well as to bench space, microscopes etc.

We also encourage researchers who are about to embark on a study that will generate a bulk collection to contact us early in their research to ensure that their collection is well curated and documented so as to have lasting value for the broader research community. And we also encourage researchers looking for a permanent home for their well-curated and documented Tasmanian bulk collections to contact us.