Russia Maps Its Digital Herbarium to the Ground
Nearly one million georeferenced collection points for botanical specimens have been made publicly available.
Russia has reached a major milestone in the digitization of scientific heritage. The herbarium of Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) now ranks fifth worldwide in terms of openly accessible georeferenced data, placing it among the global leaders in digital biodiversity infrastructure.
Following the latest database update, the coordinates of more than 840,000 botanical collection sites have been released into open access. This has propelled the MSU collection into the top tier of global herbaria by geospatial data availability.
Among Global Leaders
The MSU Herbarium is the second-largest in Russia and ranks 57th worldwide by the size of its physical holdings, which include more than 1.15 million plant specimens. Large-scale digitization has transformed the collection into one of the world’s largest electronic herbaria, accessible to both Russian and international researchers.
Georeferencing has become a central element of this effort, alongside the creation of a comprehensive image library and the digitization of specimen labels. The data are available through both the MSU Digital Herbarium and the international Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) platform.
A Digital “Flora of Russia”
Much of the work has been carried out as part of the preparation of the Atlas of the Flora of Russia, a project university researchers have been developing since 2021. To speed up the process, automated systems have been used to analyze toponyms, dates and archival information about collectors. According to specialists, particular attention is now being paid to collections gathered in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Mongolia and China.
The Collection Continues to Grow
The MSU Herbarium continues to expand actively. In 2025 alone, its holdings grew by nearly 18,400 specimens. The effort involves not only professional scientists but also online volunteers who help process data through a dedicated digital service.
The results achieved strengthen Russia’s position within the global scientific infrastructure and make domestic biological data an increasingly important part of worldwide research on flora and fauna.
