Vascular plants from European Russia in the CSBG SB RAS Digital herbarium

Vascular plants from European Russia in the CSBG SB RAS Digital herbarium

The Central Siberian Botanical Garden of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (CSBG SB RAS) is the largest botanical institution in the Asian part of Russia. Founded in 1946 CSBG SB RAS, is historically a consortium of two herbarium collections with their own acronyms (NS and NSK) and registration in the Index Herbariorum. At present the NS+NSK collections comprising about 800 000 herbarium specimens of vascular plants, mosses, lichens and fungi gathered in Siberia, the European part of Russia, the rest of Europe, Russian Far East, the rest of Asia and America (Kovtonyuk, Han, Gatilova, 2018). This is the third largest collection in Russia after the LE and MW collections. The first herbarium collection at the CSBG SB RAS was organized in 1944 on the basis of herbarium sheets transferred from the Medical and Biological Institute (Novosibirsk). In 1978 Herbarium collection named after M.G. Popov was transferred from Irkutsk to CSBG SB RAS. The consortium of two herbarium collections NS+NSK keeps about 680,000 specimens of vascular plants. At the end of 2017 the USU-Herbarium research group was organized in CSBG SB RAS for herbarium management and herbarium digitization. Our purpose is to provide open online access to the CSBG SB RAS Digital herbarium collections as a data worldwide resource for the study of biodiversity. The dataset from the European part of Russia consists of 5384 records of digitized herbarium specimens of vascular plants collected from 19th century to present. For each specimen, the species name, locality, collection date, collector, ecology and revision label are recorded. More than 94% of the records have coordinates that fall within area of European Russia west of Ural Mountains.