HERBARIUM OF HIGHER PLANT

Since 1987, at the Faculty of Geography and Geo-ecology of VSU has been created a herbarium collection, numbering about 12000 herbarium sheets, under the guidance of Professor A. Grigorievskaya. In October 2004, the herbarium was registered in the International Database "Index Herbariorum" with the assignation of the acronym VORG.
Herbarium characterizes the flora of Central Russian forest-steppe of Russia, systematically includes 1566 species of higher plants distributed between 147 families and 639 genera. The largest number of samples belongs to the families Asteraceae (917), Poaceae (845), Fabaceae (306), Brassicaceae (239). The most numerous is Stipa (273).
VORG serves as a reference material for specialists of scientific and educational institutions in Russia, and it is also used in the teaching process for such courses as "Biogeography", "Biology", "Ecology", "Plant Definition", while doing course works and dissertations.
The basic gatherings (about 6000 herbarium species) were received during expeditionary inventory of the protected areas of the Central Chernozem Region (CCHR) in 1988-1995, organized by Professor V. Fedotov. Replenishment of the collection comes due to expense of herbarium collections during the training and production practices of the students of the department, during the expeditions of the faculty staff and other receipts.
For cartographic visualization of the material and its subsequent spatial analysis, geo-information technologies are used. A computer database (DB in the EXCEL environment) was created using 10 reference parameters for describing stored herbarium specimens. Using a computer DB allows you to quickly obtain information (without extracting a herbarium sample from the repository) by geographic range, ecology, rarity category, phytocoenotic affiliation, systematic location, collection date, number of samples, sample author, number of species. The scientific adviser and main collector of VORG is Professor A. Grigoryevskaya.