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Skansen highlights biodiversity in several projects

Biodiversity – close to heart for Skansen

Skansen is the world’s oldest open-air museum, showcasing the whole of Sweden with houses and farmsteads from every part of the country. The preservation of biological diversity is one of Skansen’s core issues. It is something they keep a dialogue with their visitors about every day. In June, a new exhibition was inaugurated in the escalator that takes Skansen’s guests from the entrance up to the top of Skansenberget. The 40-meter and 80-second journey will be an experience-based one. Guests who take the escalator learn about the conservation of species and biodiversity in a way that is easy to absorb and understand at the same time.

The first part of Skansen’s exhibition on biodiversity can be found in the historic escalator from 1938. Photo: Skansen

– We hope that the escalator journey will inspire our guests to think about how social development has affected nature in different ways. We want to increase the involvement of the public in these matters, says Tomas Frisk, Zoological Director at Skansen.

The exhibition is the first part of a three-year project which is an in-depth collaboration between Skansen, Visualization Center C in Norrköping, Stockholm Resilience Center and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. The project has been supported by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg memorial fund.

“Winners and losers in Swedish nature”, a round-the-clock exhibition

The exhibition “Winners and losers in Swedish nature” on Strandvägen.

Skansen also participates and contributes to the outdoor exhibition “Winners and losers in Swedish nature” at Strandvägskajen 19 in Stockholm. The exhibition, organized by the Swedish Association of Nature Photographers, draws attention to the global and domestic threats to nature and how they affect our wild animals. 35 Swedish animal species that have been affected by changes in the environment and can be classified as winners or losers in Swedish nature today are shown here.

The exhibition is a traveling exhibition based on collaborations with local actors who work educationally with schools and arrange program activities for the public. In Stockholm, the Skansen Foundation and the Stockholm Culture Festival are partners. Educators from Skansen will be on site to give guided tours to school classes and interested members of the public during the exhibition. In this way, the visit to Skansen starts already on Strandvägen. Participating photographers are all members of the association and all have a pronounced commitment to nature and the environment. When the exhibition was shown in Uppsala, a conversation was held with some of the photographers where they talked about “their” animal.

The exhibition was inaugurated on August 12 and runs until and including September 26, 2022. It is open 24 hours a day and is illuminated during the dark hours of the day. The project “Winners and losers in Swedish nature” has been made possible through a grant from the Postcode Foundation.

Preserving Swedish landraces is important because it contributes to protecting our cultural heritage and biological diversity (15.5)

The projects are run in broad collaborations between public, private and civil society. (17.7)