Photo: Margareta Ohné

When I arrive at the Swedish Museum of Natural History on a cold December morning, the huge brick building is almost empty. The reason is well known by now: in some places in the house, large chunks of the plaster of the interior ceiling have fallen down and while waiting for all the ceilings to be inspected and, if necessary, repaired, the entire museum has closed until further notice. But I'm there to visit Anders Telenius and in the room where he works, the ceiling has been fitted with protective tiles so it's safe to be here. But how did a plant ecologist end up at the Natural History Museum?

Botany was an early attraction

We take it from the beginning: when Anders was growing up, he stayed in the countryside in Huddinge during the summer and became interested in nature and especially plants early on. In 1975 he started studying at university and after basic courses in chemistry and biology it was obvious for him to continue with botany. When he arrived at what was then called the Botany Unit in Lilla Frescati, it felt like coming home. He emphasizes how much he was inspired by others: schoolmates, other students, assistants.

But love soon made him move to Gothenburg. He remained there for ten years, but kept in touch with the plant ecologists in Stockholm all the time. In 1981, he was admitted to postgraduate studies here and from 1986 he worked as assistant lecturer. In 1986, he moved back here and in 1991 he completed his dissertation on seed dispersal in the plants Greater sea-spurrey and Lesser sea-spurrey. The following year, he became head of studies in ecology, but there was no permanent teaching position, although he was course manager for a very large number of courses.

Lecturer at Mälardalen College

Anders therefore left SU and in 1999 he became a lecturer at the Department of Biology and Chemical Engineering (!) at Mälardalen College in Eskilstuna. It was an exciting time, because they had just started building a basic education in biology there. What a contrast! But since there were only four or five teachers in biology, they could not offer more than the basics of the subject; in-depth studies had to take place at other universities. In any case, Anders became the first teacher at the university to be appointed associate professor.

At that time, there were actually more than twenty universities in the country offering biology education. For many of them, however, the education became a far too expensive affair, and this was also the case at Mälardalen University College, which discontinued the biology education after only ten years.

Anders was thus dismissed but quickly found a new job and now we are back at the National Museum and its unit for bioinformatics and genetics. Anders has worked here for fifteen years, the last few years as unit manager.

Node manager at the museum

Not many people are probably aware of the Natural History Museum's central role in collecting and analyzing biodiversity data, but it is one of the main tasks of the bioinformatics unit.
The museum is the Swedish node in the global network Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). It was formed in 2001 following an initiative from the OECD and its activities are described on the website as an international network and data infrastructure … aimed at providing anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

Anyone who is impressed by all the information in Artportalen (more than 100 million observations right now) can take a look at what is in GBIF: over 90,000 datasets (of which Artportalen is only one) and a total of more than 2, 5 billion observations and collection data, including from the Natural History Museum!

In order to coordinate all Swedish biodiversity data, a national network, called the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI), has been in place since 2021, funded by the Swedish Research Council. It is a collaborative project, which includes SU, among others, and this network also has its center at the Natural History Museum.

Anders' role has been to organize the museum's administration of both networks as node manager. This has meant that he has been able to travel a lot, he has trained people all over the world about working with biodiversity data and he has met lots of interesting people.

Teaching and research

During his time at the museum, Anders has been responsible for the course Collection care and biodiversity informatics within the Nordic master's program in biodiversity and systematics (NABiS program). However, he has not had much time for research.

Now he is newly retired and looks forward to taking up research again. He still has a workplace at the museum and his research is still about how plants spread their seeds.

How the ecology subject has changed

After a long professional life, you gain perspective on how your subject has developed, and Anders thinks that ecology has undergone major changes. Research is international in a completely different way than before, and from having been a male-dominated field, it is now more equal. And of course there has been an enormous development of methods in recent years, both in terms of DNA analyses and data analyses—ecology has become a data-driven science.

What Anders does not appreciate, however, is that certain ecological terms have been adopted by the public and the media and are used in all possible contexts that have nothing to do with ecology, often with ideological overtones. Fundamental scientific concepts such as "ecosystem" have thereby been eroded and become more or less meaningless.