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

Abstract

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 (Thiers 2020). At present the NS+NSK collections contain about 800,000 herbarium specimens comprising vascular plants (680,000), mosses (25,000), lichens (80,000) and fungi (15,000) gathered, not only in Siberia, but also in the European part of Russia and other parts of the Eurasian and American continents. CSBG SB RAS has the third largest collection in Russia after the Komarov Botanical Institute of RAS (LE) and Moscow State University (MW) collections. The dataset consists of 5,384 records of digitised herbarium specimens of vascular plants belonging to 111 families, collected since the 19th century in 54 administrative regions from the European part of Russia and kept in NS+NSK collections. Herbarium specimens were digitised using two special scanners, both ObjectScan 1600, according to international standards, at 600 dpi, with a barcode, 24-colour scale and spatial scale bar and placed into the CSBG SB RAS Digital Herbarium. 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 the area of European Russia, west of the Ural Mountains. A total of 5,384 records of vascular plant occurrences with 94.8% geolocations in the territory of the European Russia West of the Ural Mountains were entered.