The Swedish Insect Inventory Program (SIIP)
The Swedish Insect Inventory Program (SIIP) is the continuation of the Swedish Malaise Trap Project (SMTP), both financed by the Swedish Taxonomy Initiative at SLU Artdatabanken.
The Malaise trap in the primeval spruce forest on Holmön, in the archipelago off Umeå, north eastern Sweden. Image stacked from two images. Foto: Dave Karlsson.
The main goal of both projects is to map the Swedish insect fauna and discover as many as possible of the thousands of species that remain unknown in the country. SIIP supplements SMTP by sampling additional habitats and using a wider range of collection methods, with the aim of capturing as much as possible of the insect fauna that was missed during the original campaign. Species discovery is as central to SIIP as it was to SMTP.
To complement the habitats covered by SMTP, environments such as willow (Salix), reed (Phragmites), and bulrush (Typha) communities were specifically targeted when selecting sites for SIIP’s 48 Malaise traps at 22 locations across Sweden. In addition, suburban and urban environments are of increasing interest to entomologists, ecologists, and the general public. SIIP therefore included several collection sites in disturbed habitats and suburban gardens and even on a rooftop at Regeringsgatan ("Government Street") in central Stockholm!
Collection methods ranged from ground level to the canopy, and everywhere in between. At several sites, additional collection methods were used, including pan traps, flight interception traps, and, not least, newly developed canopy traps. In every way, SIIP aims to maximize the diversity of insects collected from each habitat and ecological niche.
Under the “Traps” link on the left, you can find all the locations where we have collected insects, metadata for all trap samples, and environmental photos from every site.
A total of 1,886 samples were collected during 2018–2019: 1,185 Malaise-trap samples, 255 pan trap samples, 75 flight-interception-trap samples, and 361 canopy-trap samples. All samples are stored at Station Linné on Öland, where processing is ongoing. The samples are estimated to contain approximately 10 million insects.
An additional 10 Malaise traps were operated for a couple of months during the summer of 2021, yielding 78 samples. No environmental photographs are available for these traps, but metadata for all 78 samples are available.
Don’t miss the additional information available under each individual trap link!
Updated 2026-10-02