Herbarium of the Papanin Institute for Biology of Inland Waters RAS

The herbarium of the IBIW RAS was founded in 1954 by A. M. Leontiev, T. B. Posokhina, A. P. Belavskaya and other staff members of the N. A. Morozov biological station "Borok". The collection is specialized, it represents mainly aquatic and semiaquatic macroscopic plants of the flora of Russia and countries of the former USSR, and recently of the world, mainly of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the only herbarium of this type in Russia. The collection has more than 77000 plant specimens. The main part is made up of vascular plants. The collection also contains more than 1500 specimens of macroalgae, up to 1000 of aquatic mosses. The named collection of the founder of hydrobotany V. M. Katanskaya, which counts up to 5000 specimens, was allocated. The geography includes mainly the territory of the former USSR, but West Europe, Central Asia and North America are also represented. There are also collections from other regions of the world. From the territory of Russia the largest number of specimens is collected in the European part and in the Volga basin in particular, large collections represent Enisei Siberia, East Siberia and the Far East. The herbarium is in great demand among hydrobotanists, florists, systematists; it has become a kind of a center for the study of aquatic plants of the country. Employees of scientific institutions of Russia and abroad often work in it. There is an exchange of collection material — every year the herbarium receives at least 500 specimens from different places in Russia and other countries. In 2000 the herbarium was assigned an international index (IBIW), it was cited in the international system "Index Herbariorum", on the Russian portal "Genetic and biological (zoological and botanical) collections of the Russian Federation" and others. In 1997 an electronic database was created and maintained. In 2023 the work on digitization of the collection in 600 dpi resolution on Microtek ObjectScan 1600 scanner was started.

Website launched 29.03.2024.

Made by the project of the Russian Science Foundation no. 23-14-00115 “Aquatic vascular plants of Russia: comprehensive revision and preparing of the manual”.

Scanning of herbarium specimens is performed by L. A. Efimova (IBIW RAS) since 05.2023 and G. A. Bobrov since 04.2026.
Georeferencing of herbarium specimens without geographic coordinates was done by U. A. Tsvetkova (IBIW RAS) from 04.2023 to 12.2024.

Reference: Virtual herbarium IBIW RAS (IBIW). 2026. https://en.herb.ibiw.ru/ (Accessed on dd.mm.year).