Description
The Zoological Museum of the University of Athens (ZMUA) was established in 1858. It is the oldest natural history museum of Greece. The museum began its operation with the acquisition of a core collection and has been expanding ever since. One of the most substantial parts of the museum's collection consists of the avian exhibits, originating from around the world.
Today, the avian collection consists of 2,948 specimens, preserved mostly through taxidermy, along with a significant number of eggs. The birds have been collected from around the world. A substantial part of the collection consists of individuals originating from Greece, Brazil, Canada and Australia. Having this valuable source of biogeographic information and a potential reserve of historical genetic diversity, ZMUA presents here the contents of the avian collection.
Data Records
The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 2,947 records.
This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.
Versions
The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.
How to cite
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
Papastefanou G, Legakis A, Shogolev I (2016) The Avian Collection of the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens (ZMUA). Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e10598. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.4.e10598
Rights
Researchers should respect the following rights statement:
The publisher and rights holder of this work is Biodiversity Data Journal. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License.
GBIF Registration
This resource has been registered with GBIF, and assigned the following GBIF UUID: 0f855442-f098-4f66-ad23-efd43b8768d9. Biodiversity Data Journal publishes this resource, and is itself registered in GBIF as a data publisher endorsed by Participant Node Managers Committee.
Keywords
Occurrence; Specimen
External data
The resource data is also available in other formats
| ZMUA_AVES.xlsx | https://bdj.pensoft.net/article/download/suppl/3465391/ UTF-8 Microsoft Excel |
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| Zoological Museum of the University of Athens | http://lifewww-00.her.hcmr.gr:8080/gbifgreece/resource.do?r=list_of_aves_of_the_zoological_museum_of_the_university_of_athens_ UTF-8 |
Contacts
- Researcher
- Point Of Contact
- Researcher
- Point Of Contact
- Researcher
Geographic Coverage
The avian specimens deposited in the ZMUA collection have worldwide origin. Particularly, the exhibits’ origin is from 214 different localities that belong to 52 countries in all continents. Most of them were collected from Greece (34%), while the second largest collection comes from Brazil (23%). Furthermore, a substantial part of the collection comes from Canada (9%) and Australia (7%) (Fig. 2). Specimens originating from Greece were collected from 53 different localities. Most of the birds come from Attica (79%) where the Museum is situated, followed by Mount Taygetos in Peloponnese (5%) and Mount Olympus in Macedonia (3%).
| Bounding Coordinates | South West [-90, -180], North East [90, 180] |
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Taxonomic Coverage
Aves
| Class | Aves (birds) |
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Temporal Coverage
| Start Date / End Date | 1806-01-01 / 2010-01-26 |
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Sampling Methods
Specimens deposited in the ZMUA collection are the result of collections made by the staff of the museum, donations and fortuitous findings. Therefore, no specific sampling protocol has been followed. Ιf in a certain sampling expedition a protocol was followed then this information is not available. Specimens are basically preserved through taxidermy. Newer deposits are stored in frozen condition.
| Study Extent | The avian specimens deposited in the ZMUA collection have worldwide origin. Particularly, the exhibits’ origin is from 214 different localities that belong to 52 countries in all continents. Most of them were collected from Greece (34%), while the second largest collection comes from Brazil (23%). Furthermore, a substantial part of the collection comes from Canada (9%) and Australia (7%). Specimens originating from Greece were collected from 53 different localities. Most of the birds come from Attica (79%) where the Museum is situated, followed by Mount Taygetos in Peloponnese (5%) and Mount Olympus in Macedonia (3%). |
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| Quality Control | Before deposition to the museum collection, associated information of the specimens has being sought. However, owing to frequent relocations of the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens and several misfortunate events, some of the exhibits and the relevant meta-data have been lost. All preserved information has been curated according to Chapman (2005). Scientific names have been updated following the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) taxonomy. None of the data connected to the specimens contained coordinates. Therefore, all locations were manually georeferenced, based on the locality names, description and dates, following georeferencing guidelines by Chapman and Wieczorek (2006). |
Method step description:
- Digitization, quality control checks and data analysis were made possible in the context of LifeWatchGreece project.
Collection Data
| Collection Name | Avian collection of the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens (ZMUA) |
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| Collection Identifier | https://scientific-collections.gbif.org/collection/db4314a9-fa84-4532-80c9-65d66ebc9c50 |
| Specimen preservation methods | Mounted |
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Additional Metadata
| Alternative Identifiers | https://ipt.pensoft.net/resource?r=zmua_aves |
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| https://ipt.pensoft.net/resource?r=zmua_aves |