Talk:Moscow University Herbarium

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Page scope

Moscow University Herbarium is about the herbarium of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MW): its history, its collections, the Moscow Digital Herbarium that publishes them and the Cannabis sheets among them. Sheets that have their own accession pages are listed at the foot of the article.

Sourcing

The institutional facts come from the university's own pages (the collection description on the Moscow Digital Herbarium and two news items of the Faculty of Biology), from Alexey Seregin's reports in Taxon (2020 and 2025), from the herbarium's dataset description on GBIF and from its entry in GBIF's Global Registry of Scientific Collections. The 18th-century history comes from Irina Kalinichenko's study of botany teaching at the university (2024). The Cannabis figures are GBIF's, as they stood on 13 November 2026, and the single sheets are cited from their pages on the Moscow Digital Herbarium. Discuss sourcing and attribution here.

Discussion

Founding date

The collection description on the Moscow Digital Herbarium dates the herbarium to "probably about 1765" (вероятно, около 1765 года), and the institution's entry in GBIF's Global Registry of Scientific Collections gives 1765. The Faculty of Biology's news item of 24 January 2017 dates the first mention of the herbarium to 1780. Seregin's paper in Izvestiya RAN, Seriya Biologicheskaya (2017, no. 6) speaks of an "almost 250-year history". Kalinichenko (2024) writes that almost nothing is known of the university's herbaria before the Demidov gift of 1789, though plant collecting was on the lecture timetable from 1765/66.

Size and rank

• Seregin (2025): 1,137,501 specimens in July 2025, second in Russia after the Komarov Institute and 60th in the world.
• GBIF dataset description: 1,157,810 specimens, 5,155 of them types, on 12 December 2025, and 57th in the world.
• The same Global Registry entry: 944,060 specimens. Its description, last updated in January 2013, gives about 4,500 types.
• The collection description on the Moscow Digital Herbarium: 1,011,253 specimens in November 2016 and 60th in the world; Seregin (2017) gives the same total for November 2016 and the rank as 61st.

The regional figures (European part of the former USSR, Siberia and the Far East, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Kazakhstan, the Crimea, Mongolia) are those of its 2013 description.

Funding of the scanning

The GBIF dataset description places the scanning, from May 2015, under the programme of the National Depository Bank of Live Systems at Moscow University. Seregin (2020) says that the commercial partner's scanning in 2015–2018 was paid for by the Russian Science Foundation.

Goldbach

The label of sheet MW0317311 (Odessa, 1822) names the general systematic collection of L. F. Goldbach in the herbarium of the Imperial Moscow Society of Naturalists. Kalinichenko (2024) names the herbarium of M. Goldbach, kept at MW, as the one that holds the few Demidov specimens to survive the fire of 1812. The initials differ, and neither source says whether the two are one collection. The label of MW0771314 (1814) gives only "Собр. Гольдбах" (collected by Goldbach) and the year.

Cannabis counts

The counts are for the genus Cannabis in the dataset Moscow University Herbarium (MW) on GBIF, on 13 November 2026, with the country as GBIF gives it. One of the two sheets with no country is MW0771314 of 1814, which the Moscow Digital Herbarium places in western Europe. GBIF gives one determination per sheet, the latest. Ernest Small's appears in three spellings ("E. Small", "Small E." and "E. Small, Canada Agriculture"), 47 sheets in all. On MW0818716 GBIF has the year 1975 only, and the slip on the sheet reads "E. Small, Canada Agriculture, Aug. 1975"; it names the plant Cannabis sativa subsp. sativa var. spontanea.