The Altai State University Virtual Herbarium has become the largest digital collection of Altai plants in the world

Scientists from Altai State University are creating a unique digital collection of Altai plants, where all known and new species will be presented. In total, Altai has about 2,700 different plant species, of which about 300 are endemic (found only in a certain area). Both medicinal and weed plants, as well as promising for science, the virtual herbarium project is something like a “global inventory” of the flora of our region.

The scientists note that the wild flora of Altai Krai and adjacent territories of the Altai highlands is a basic natural asset and a genetic reserve. This national resource has the highest potential in solving social problems of environmental and food security, and is also capable of ensuring the technological independence of the country and region.

Availability of information about genetic resources of plant diversity is a strategic task for the Altai macroregion and Russia as a whole. An important point is the re-verifiability and public availability of information.

Digitization of natural science collections will help systematize collection funds and simplify access to them. The data (label information, information on DNA sequences, georeferences and digital copies of herbarium sheets) are stored in the north of Altai State University and are openly available via the Internet to all interested users for processing and analysis.

“Due to the rapid development of digital technologies and the “avalanche-like” accumulation of big data in the Life Sciences, today projects on the “digital footprint” of the bioresource potential of certain territories are gaining their peak popularity,” says Alexey Vaganov, a researcher at the South Siberian Botanical Garden of Altai State University. “Our team has indexed in GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Fund) by mid-2023 a new data package of more than 6,600 records in the key dataset (data collection) “Virtual Herbarium ALTB (South-Siberian Botanical Garden)”; a second proportionate data set is coming this fall. In total, by the end of 2023, we expect more than 60 thousand entries in GBIF from ALTB.”

The number of data sets themselves from Altai State University has also increased (Altai State University’s profile as a data operator in GBIF). This year, in addition to Altai State University data sets, their number also began to include data from our partners – nature reserves and national parks of Russia and Kazakhstan. However, the most significant data set was the dataset on DNA barcodes of vascular plants of Altai, based on the type collection of the ALTB Herbarium. The fund of type material is the “golden fund” of any natural science collection. Thus, Altai State University, as a data operator in GBIF, has risen in scientific and organizational terms from the population-biosphere level to the organism-molecular-genetic level.

The number of citations of data sets from Altai State University, which are used by scientific groups around the world, is also growing exponentially. Thus, to date, this number has reached 240 citations of ALTB Virtual Herbarium data.

Research on the development of the digital collection of the ALTB Visual Herbarium is carried out within the framework of the Russian Science Foundation project “Study of phytodiversity and genetic resources of the Altai mountainous country based on big data.”

Project implementers are trained in biodiversity informatics skills in the online course “Computer Technologies in Biology” on Stepik (authored by Vaganov A.V.) as part of the international project “BioDATA Advanced – DNA barcoding, biological collections and field observations for the purposes of accelerated biodiversity research.”