Moss occurrences in Yugyd Va National Park, Subpolar and Northern Urals, European North-East Russia

Abstract Background This study produced a dataset containing information on moss occurrences in the territory of Yugyd Va National Park, located in the Subpolar and Northern Urals, European North-East Russia. The dataset summarises occurrences noted by long-term bryological explorations in remote areas of the Subpolar and Northern Urals from 1943 to 2015 and from studies published since 1915. The dataset consists of 4,120 occurrence records. The occurrence data were extracted from herbarium specimen labels (3,833 records) and data from published literature (287 records). Most of the records (4,104) are georeferenced. A total of 302 moss taxa belonging to 112 genera and 36 families are reported herein to occur in Yugyd Va National Park. The diversity of bryophytes in this National Park has not yet been fully explored and further exploration will lead to more taxa. New information A total of 4,120 moss occurrences records in the territory of Yugyd Va National Park were published.


Introduction
Yugyd Va National Park is the largest protected area in the Komi Republic. The area of Yugyd Va is 18,941 km or 35% of the total area of all the Komi Republic's protected areas. Yugyd Va National Park and Pechora-Ilych Nature Reserve (the latter being adjacent to the southern part of the National Park) were recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, the Virgin Komi Forests, in 1995. This territory is a remnant of the largest intact forest area in Europe. This area is a refugium for many animal and plant species that are endangered or have disappeared in other places and functions as a source of genetic diversity for many boreal species' populations (Degteva and Ponomarev 2014).
The earliest data on the mosses of Yugyd Va National Park were published by the famous Russian botanist R.R. Pole (Pole 1915). His investigations were carried out in 1905 and 1907 in the Shchugor River basin in the Northern Urals. Later, Y. Tsinserling in 1926 and P.L. Gorchakovskii in 1954 collected mosses in the vicinity of Mount Sablya in the Subpolar Urals (Tsinzerling 1935, Gorchakovskiy 1958. V.B. Kuvaev collected mosses on the mountain slopes in the basins of the Shchugor River in the Northern Urals and the Kozhim River in the Subpolar Urals in 1948-1949(Kuvaev 1970. A.P. Dyachenko conducted botanical research in 1984 on Mount Narodnaya in the Kosyu River basin in the Subpolar Urals (Dyachenko 1997, Dyachenko andFomicheva 1986). I.D. Kildyushevskiy explored the vegetation cover of the Subpolar Urals in the Kozhym River basin in 1948-1951. Collections made in the course of these studies created the background for further accounts devoted to the moss flora of the Subpolar Urals (Kildyushevskiy 1956).
Specialists from the Institute of Biology of Komi Scientific Centre of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences began botanical exploration of Yugyd Va National Park in 1943. As a result, 3,829 moss occurrences were recorded from its territory by 2015 (or 93% of the known moss occurrences in the park). More than 99% of the moss samples from this protected area, stored in the SYKO Herbarium, were collected by specialists of this Institute. About 27% of the occurrences documented in the SYKO Herbarium were made by the authors of this article (Degteva S., Zheleznova G.). The following botanists took part in the identification of the mosses of Yugyd Va National Park stored in the SYKO Herbarium: Abramova A.L., Afonina O.M., Efimova S.F., Fedosov V.E., Ignatova E.A., 2 Ignatov M.S., Kildyushevskiy I.D., Savich L., Shennikova M., Shlyakov R.N., Shubina T.P. and Zheleznova G.V. Authors of this paper (Zheleznova G.V., Shubina T.P.) had identified about 80% of the collection. The moss flora analyses of the Yugyd Va National Park were published in a series of works by Shubina 2007, Zheleznova 2010, Zheleznova and Shubina 2012, Zheleznova et al. 2015b, Zheleznova et al. 2015a, Zheleznova et al. 2016, Degteva 2016, Zheleznova et al. 2013. Published datasets on moss occurrences in Russia, i.e. Database of Moss Flora of Russia (Ivanov et al. 2017), Cryptogamic Russian Information System (CRIS) (Melechin et al. 2013) and GBIF (GBIF.org 2018), do not contain information about moss records in the territory of Yugyd Va National Park.
Prepared according the concept of "data paper" Penev 2011, Penev et al. 2017), this paper aims to describe a dataset on moss occurrences in Yugyd Va National Park (Subpolar and Northern Urals) recently published by us in GBIF as a Darwin Core Archive ; see also Suppl. material 1).

Project description
Title: Moss occurrences in Yugyd Va National Park, Subpolar and Northern Urals, European North-East Russia

Personnel: Svetlana Degteva, Tatyana Shubina
Study area description: Yugyd Va National Park is the largest National Park in Europe and contains an array of primary boreal (Northern) forests preserved in an almost undisturbed state. The park is located on the western slopes of the Subpolar and the Northern Urals, on the border between Europe and Asia. The Urals are a mountain range that runs almost continuously along the 60°E meridian from the Arctic Ocean coast to the Ural River and north-western Kazakhstan. The Urals are a large and important biogeographic boundary that separates the flora and fauna of the continents of Europe and Asia (Chibilev 2011).
Most landscapes within these areas are free from anthropogenic impacts, so plant communities and their dynamics exist there in their natural state. Natural succession in these forests is initiated by such disturbances as windfalls and fires. Recreational uses of the park include rafting, boating and hiking in the summer and Nordic skiing in the winter. Due to the remote location of the park, the amount of tourism there is still quite low.

Design description:
The study of the flora and vegetation diversity of terrestrial ecosystems in the park was performed with an integrated approach at both community and species levels. The standard methods of plant systematics, geobotany and phytogeography were used. Important "Plant Areas" were studied by describing plant communities along altitudinal gradients from watercourses to their watersheds. The results of this study were documented in the Herbarium (SYKO) of the Institute of Biology of Komi Scientific Centre of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
A dataset was prepared from data published in scientific literature and acquired from the moss collection of the Herbarium (SYKO). The earliest collections examined came from 1943 and the most recent from 2015. For each species, information is given on the catalogue number, including herbarium label data from the moss collection of the Herbarium (SYKO), associated references, basis of record, geographic locality, verbatim locality, geographic coordinates, collection date, collector and person who identified the specimen ("identified by").

Study extent:
This study was carried out in the foothills and mountain landscapes of the Subpolar Urals, in the basins of four first-order tributaries of the Pechora River: the Kozhim River (in the Rosomakha, Maldynyrd, Zapadnye Saledy, Yuasnyrd, Maldyiz and Obeiz mountain ranges), the Kosyu River (in the Vostochnye Saledy and Kolokolenny mountain ranges), the Bolshaya Synya River (on Sablinskiy ridge) and the upper stream of the Shchugor River. The major tributaries of the Kozhim River studied were the Balbanyu River, Limbekoyu River and Syvyu River. In the Kosyu River basin, the territories near its major tributary (the Vangyr River) and near the lakes Mezhgornye and Okunevye were studied. In the basin of the upper stream of the Bolshaya Synya River, the areas adjacent to its tributaries, including the Voyvozh-Synya River and the Lunvozh-Synya River, were studied.
Mosses of the Northern Urals were collected in the basin of the Shchugor River (in the Telpos and Sumk-Ner mountain ranges and on the mountains Telpos-iz, Yank-Kart-Tump, Vay-Khury-Tump and Khodymalya-Tump) and two of its tributaries: the Podcherem River (Pelener Mountain) and the Telpos River.

Sampling description:
The authors contributing to the dataset used standard methods of mosses collection. The collecting localities were arbitrarily chosen in an attempt to include the largest number of different floristic associations and landscape forms in the samples. To achieve this purpose, a net of radial routes around each field base camp was planned. Short descriptions of plant communities were made in the localities of mosses collection. Moss samples were collected once and on each type of substrate.
In addition to the authors' collections, the dataset includes information on moss occurrences obtained from literature (Dyachenko 1997, Dyachenko and Fomicheva 1986, Gorchakovskiy 1958, Kildyushevskiy 1956, Kuvaev 1970, Pole 1915, Tsinzerling 1935). More than 92% of the occurrence records were based on preserved samples from the Herbarium (SYKO) ( Table 1). Some records (412) from locations adjacent to the border of the National Park were also included in the dataset.

Data source
Number of records Number of species Step description: On each herbarium label, the following fields were filled out: "Scientific name", "Locality" (with geographic coordinates), "Habitat", "Substrate", "Collector name", "Determined by" (identification), "Collection date" and "Catalogue Number". For the data obtained from literature, the descriptions given by the author(s) were converted into these herbarium label fields when possible. The dataset fields' names were chosen according to Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) and include the following: «occurrenceID», «institutionID», «collectionCode», «catalogNumber», «associatedReferences», «basisOfRecord», «kingdom», «phylum», «class», «family», «genus», «scientificName», «specificEpithet», «scientificNameAuthorship», «infraspecificEpithet», «taxonRank», «country», «countryCode», «recordedBy», «day», «month», «year», «locality», References to the published literature, from which data were obtained for the checklist compilation, are presented in the "citations" section of the metadata. The herbarium label data were taken from the moss collection of the Herbarium (SYKO). All occurrence records were merged into one Microsoft Excel worksheet. The species names given were determined according to the Check-list of mosses of East Europe and North Asia (Ignatov et al. 2006). The unique values from the "Species" field were used as a preliminary Yugyd Va National Park mosses checklist. The preliminary checklist was verified on the "taxonomic name resolution service" (Boyle et al. 2013) with the help of the "taxize" package in the R environment (Chamberlain and Szocs 2013).
In most cases, georeferencing was performed using paper maps of different scales. The maps were in the Kavrayskiy projection and SK-42 reference system. Maps with a 1:500000 scale were used for obtaining coordinates with 1-minute precision (3,903 occurrences). Maps with a scale of 1:100000 were used for obtaining 1-second-precision coordinates (269 occurrences). The remaining 22 occurrences were left ungeoreferenced because of the ambiguity of the locality description. All coordinates were transformed in the WGS 84 reference system with QGIS software. The coordinate uncertainty in metres for each occurrence was calculated with the Georeferencing Calculator (Wieczorek and Wieczorek 2015).

Geographic coverage
Description: The length of Yugyd Va National Park is 280 km from North to South and 120 km from West to East. It is located on the western macroslopes of the Subpolar and Northern Urals (Fig. 1).
The Subpolar Urals are part of the Ural Mountains and run from the headwaters of the Lyapin (Khulga) River in the north (65°40'N) to Telposiz Mountain in the south (64°0'N). The mountainous area covers about 32,000 km . There are two main watersheds of the Subpolar Urals: Narodo-Itinsky in the east, with a length of more than 100 km and Issledovatelsky in the west, with a length of more than 150 km. The northern continuation of the Issledovatelsky Range is the Rossomakha Ridge. Traces of glaciation are manifested in the large irregularities of these ridges. The slopes of the mountains are composed of stone placers. The Subpolar Urals are characterised by ridges with high altitudes and alpine landforms. The average height of the peaks is 1300-1400 m. The highest point of the Urals is located at Narodnaya Mountain (1,896 m). The Subpolar Urals have a pronounced asymmetry in their slopes: the eastern slopes of the Subpolar Urals gradually pass into the lowland wetlands of the West Siberian Lowland region, whereas the ridges of the western slopes end abruptly at the Pechora Plain (Chibilev 2011, Taskaev 2006.  Mountain meadows do not cover large areas and establish mainly ecotopes with rich and humid soils at stream runoffs, valleys and the borders of the stony fields. Mountain tundra communities are located at flat plates and mountain terraces of the upper part of slopes. The cold goltsy desert belt in the Subpolar Urals begins at 300-700 m, in the Northern Urals -at 1000-1100 m (Chibilev 2011, Taskaev 2006. The climate in this part of the Urals is strongly continental. The meridional location of the ridges has a significant effect on the climate by preventing the movement of moist air masses from west to east. The Subpolar and Northern Urals are distinguished from other parts of the Urals by the relatively abundant precipitation they receive (up to 1,500 mm per year). Most of the precipitation falls in the summer months, from June to August (40-50%).
In winter, about 30-40% of the annual precipitation falls. The average monthly temperature of the coldest month (January) in these mountains ranges from -18°C to -20°C, while that of the warmest month (July) is +10°C. The duration of the summer period is 60-75 days (Ponomarev and Pystina 2009)

Taxonomic coverage
Description: All mosses were identified to species.
The coverage of the checklist spans the phylum Bryophyta. The highest number of records are from the Bryopsida (84.5%), followed by the Sphagnopsida (8.9%), Polytrichopsida (5.3%), Andreaeopsida (1%) and Tetraphidopsida (0.3%). The top ten families, in terms of the number of species included, comprise about 62% of the species. The top ten families, in terms of the number of occurrences recorded, comprise 77% of the occurrences (Table  2). Of these two groups of top ten families, 60% were included in both groups (Figs 2, 3).

Figure 2.
Taxonomic distribution of species amongst moss families in the dataset. The figure was prepared with the "treemap" package in R (Tennekes 2017) The moss flora of Yugyd Va National Park contains a high number of species, especially taking into account the fact that surveys of the whole territory have not yet been concluded because of the inaccessibility of the region. Although the present survey cannot be considered as complete, the high number of recorded taxa, 302 species belonging to 112 genera and 36 families, already points towards richness of the moss flora of the area. Most of the species are typical members of the Boreal and Holarctic bryoflora and endemic taxa were not recorded. According to available data, the known moss flora of Yugyd Va National Park comprises 60% of the entire known moss flora of the Komi Republic (   kingdom The full scientific name of the kingdom in which the taxon is classified. phylum The full scientific name of the phylum or division in which the taxon is classified. class The full scientific name of the class in which the taxon is classified. family The full scientific name of the family in which the taxon is classified.

genus
The full scientific name of the genus in which the taxon is classified. georeferencedBy A list (concatenated and separated) of names of people, groups or organisations who determined the georeference (spatial representation) for the Location. geodeticDatum The ellipsoid, geodetic datum or spatial reference system (SRS) upon which the geographic coordinates given in decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude is based.