"Open Science": scientists from Altai State University have created a unique virtual herbarium of Altai

The articlereports about the largest collection of plants from the Altai mountainous country, which united Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China, which is kept in the herbarium of the South Siberian Botanical Garden of Altai State University. The collection numbers over 450,000 items, making it the seventh largest in Russia and the fourth largest among the herbariums of Russian universities.

"The main goal of this article is to draw the attention of the scientific community to botanical research of the transboundary territory of the Altai mountain country and to the future development of digital plant collections in partnership with the Global Biodiversity Information Fund (GBIF)," explains project manager for the creation of a virtual herbarium, senior researcher at SSBG of AltSU Alexey Vaganov. “The virtual herbarium ALTB is the largest collection of plants from the transboundary territory of Altai and the primary material of the Flora Altai project.”

“The world scientific community in the field of biological diversity of the world calls for speaking a single language of science, taking into account certain universal specifications and standardizing a variety of individual methods that are practiced by many world scientific teams. This will help to combine research data conducted by different scientific groups into a single, understandable for everyone and effective for the operation of big data. All this implies Data Paper - a special type of publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals that describes a dataset. Our article also belongs to this type, which is its advantage. This is evidenced by the fact that since its publication, the dataset of the article has already been cited 75 times,” explained A. Vaganov.

Another advantage of the standardized data presented in the "ALTB Virtual Herbarium", according to Aleksey, is that not only biologists, but also mathematicians, geographers, physicists are beginning to show interest in them, as a set of data presented in the herbarium, thanks to a single specification becomes clear to everyone.