Moscow University Herbarium
More actions
| Moscow University Herbarium | |
|---|---|
| |
| Type | University herbarium |
| Website | plant.depo.msu.ru |
| Founded | c. 1765 |
| Base | Moscow, Russia |
| Scope | Temperate Eurasia, above all Russia and the former Soviet Union |
| Focus | Vascular plants and bryophytes |
| Other sites | GBIF dataset |
The Moscow University Herbarium is the herbarium of Lomonosov Moscow State University, registered in Index Herbariorum under the code MW. In July 2025 it held 1,137,501 specimens, which made it the second-largest herbarium in Russia after that of the Komarov Botanical Institute in Saint Petersburg.[1] Nearly every sheet has been scanned and published on the university's Moscow Digital Herbarium website and through GBIF. The images and data carry a CC BY 4.0 licence.[2] The digitised collection includes 236 sheets of Cannabis collected between 1814 and 2022, two-thirds of them in Russia and most of the rest in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and the Caucasus.[3]
History
Two dates are given for the herbarium's beginnings. The university's description of the collection dates it to about 1765.[4] A news item of the Faculty of Biology in 2017 puts its first mention in 1780.[5] Plant collecting (gerbarizatsiya) was on the university's lecture timetable from the academic year 1765/66, when P. D. Veniaminov taught it with botanical philosophy.[6]
Two private herbaria came to the university in the 18th century. The physician K. I. Shchepin's collection of dried plants passed to the university after his death in 1770, by the account of V. M. Richter (1820). In 1789 the widow and sons of Prokofy Demidov gave the university the herbarium he had gathered himself, more than twenty volumes in all. Nearly all the university's collections, instruments and books were destroyed when Moscow burned in 1812. A few of Demidov's specimens survive in the herbarium of M. Goldbach, which is now part of the Moscow University Herbarium.[6]
The herbarium is also called the Syreishchikov Herbarium, after the botanist D. P. Syreishchikov, who came to work in it after the Russian Revolution.[4][7] A small herbarium that had passed through the hands of Carl Linnaeus reached it from the botanical garden at Gorenki by way of the Moscow Society of Naturalists.[7] The herbarium belongs to the Department of Geobotany of the university's Faculty of Biology. At the end of 2015 it had six staff and up to 15 unpaid helpers.[4]
Collections
Most of the herbarium's sheets come from the former Soviet Union. In January 2013 it held 334,310 specimens from the European part of the former USSR, 152,250 from Siberia and the Russian Far East, 93,470 from the Caucasus, 91,280 from Central Asia and Kazakhstan and 30,690 from the Crimea, with a further 27,200 from Mongolia.[8] The sheets are spread fairly evenly over two centuries of collecting.[9]
Several historical herbaria are kept apart from the general collection: those of Georg Franz Hoffmann, Jakob Friedrich Ehrhart and Carl Bernhard von Trinius, and plants of Johann Reinhold and Georg Forster with those of their correspondents.[2][8]
In December 2025 the collections numbered 1,157,810 specimens of 37,158 species of vascular plants and bryophytes, 5,155 of them type specimens. The millionth specimen was added in June 2016. Between 15,000 and 20,000 are added in an average year, and 18,367 were added in 2025.[2]
The Moscow Digital Herbarium
Scanning of the collections began in May 2015 under the programme of the National Depository Bank of Live Systems.[2] Between 2015 and 2018 a commercial partner, paid by the Russian Science Foundation, scanned 93 per cent of the general collection at 300 dpi and every type specimen at 600 dpi.[9] The imaging was finished at the end of 2018. Each scan went online with the name the sheet is filed under, the currently accepted name, a geographic area code, the country, the collection date and the main collector.[1] Sheets scanned after 2020 are imaged at 520 dpi.[2]
The university opened the Moscow Digital Herbarium website in October 2016 to publish the scans. By 31 December 2018 it held 968,031 images of 971,732 specimens.[9] Each sheet has a page under its barcode, such as https://plant.depo.msu.ru/open/public/item/MW0317311, which shows the scan, the label text where it has been entered and the licence, CC BY 4.0.[10] In April 2019 the site became a consortium when other Russian herbaria began to publish through it.[9] In 2025 eleven herbaria used it, among them the herbaria of the Main Botanical Garden of the Russian Academy of Sciences (MHA) and of Irkutsk State University (IRKU).[1]
Transcribing the labels and fixing each collecting place on the map came after the scanning. In July 2025, 811,338 of the herbarium's 1,085,763 digitised specimens had coordinates. About a fifth of those were taken from the labels themselves: the share of newly collected sheets whose labels give coordinates rose from 39.5 per cent in 2000 to 78 per cent in 2015. Staff placed 37 per cent by hand from old and modern maps. The rest, 42 per cent, were placed by ISTRA, an algorithm written for the project. It groups the sheets by collector and date; one sheet of each group is placed by hand, and the others gathered by the same collector on the same day take its place. Volunteers have entered label data through a module of the site called Pomogator since December 2022. Many old sheets cannot be placed, because their labels give no locality, no full date or no collector.[1]
The data reach GBIF as the dataset Moscow University Herbarium (MW), published from the university's own Integrated Publishing Toolkit since November 2017 and updated weekly.[2][9] On 13 November 2026 it held 1,105,390 specimens under a CC BY 4.0 licence. The specimen images that GBIF shows with them name ELAR, a Moscow firm, as their maker and Moscow State University as the rights holder.[2][3]
Cannabis specimens
On 13 November 2026 the herbarium's GBIF dataset held 236 sheets of Cannabis, all of them scanned and none of them type material. Of these, 158 are from Russia, 28 from Kazakhstan, 15 from Mongolia and eight from Ukraine. Kyrgyzstan has five, Azerbaijan four, Georgia and India three each and China two. Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Japan, Moldova, North Korea and Uzbekistan have one each, and two sheets carry no country. They are filed under two names: 196 as Cannabis sativa and 40 as Cannabis sativa var. ruderalis, 36 of the latter from Russia. The dated sheets run from 1814 to 2022. Eighteen carry no date.[3]
The oldest dated sheet bears only the year 1814 and the collector's name, Goldbach, and is placed in western Europe.[11] The next is from Odessa, collected by Prescott in 1822. Its label is that of the general systematic collection of L. F. Goldbach in the herbarium of the Imperial Moscow Society of Naturalists.[10]
Ernest Small redetermined many of the herbarium's Cannabis sheets in the 1970s. GBIF names him as the identifier of 47 of them. All but one of these determinations date from 1975, most of them from August; the exception is dated September 1974. All 47 are filed as Cannabis sativa. Thirty-two are from Russia and 11 from Kazakhstan, and the dated ones were collected between 1822 and 1958.[3]
Accessions
Accessions held at the Moscow University Herbarium: 61.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Seregin, Alexey P. (December 2025). "Georeferencing of the Moscow University Herbarium (MW) dataset is completed". Taxon. 74 (6): 1641–1643. doi:10.1002/tax.70067.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 "Moscow University Herbarium (MW)". GBIF. Moscow State University. doi:10.15468/cpnhcc. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 "Occurrence search: Cannabis in the dataset Moscow University Herbarium (MW)". GBIF. Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Коллекции" [Collections]. Moscow Digital Herbarium (in русский). Moscow State University. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ "В МГУ заработал один из крупнейших в мире цифровых гербариев" [One of the world's largest digital herbaria opens at Moscow State University]. Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University (in русский). 24 January 2017. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Kalinichenko, Irina M. (2024). "Преподавание ботаники в Московском университете в первое его пятидесятилетие" [The teaching of botany in Moscow University in its first fifty years] (PDF). Byulleten' Moskovskogo Obshchestva Ispytatelei Prirody. Otdel Biologicheskii (in русский). 129 (5): 68–80. doi:10.55959/MSU0027-1403-BB-2024-129-5-68-80.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 "Видеосюжет о Гербарии МГУ" [A video on the Moscow University Herbarium]. Faculty of Biology, Moscow State University (in русский). 21 December 2012. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 "Moscow State University (MW)". Global Registry of Scientific Collections. GBIF. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Seregin, Alexey P. (April 2020). "Moscow Digital Herbarium: a consortium since 2019". Taxon. 69 (2): 417–419. doi:10.1002/tax.12228.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 "Specimen MW0317311: Cannabis sativa L." Moscow Digital Herbarium (in русский). Moscow State University. Retrieved 13 November 2026.
- ↑ "Specimen MW0771314: Cannabis sativa L." Moscow Digital Herbarium (in русский). Moscow State University. Retrieved 13 November 2026.