The present article aimed at digital representation and making publicly available the data on the distribution of vascular plants from the herbarium collection of the Kandalaksha Strict Nature Reserve.

Origin of collections

The Kandalaksha Strict Nature Reserve was founded in 1932 as a legally-protected area and a research institution aimed at monitoring and studying animals and plants of that area (Karpovich 1988). To document the plant diversity of the Nature Reserve, its herbarium collection was established in line with the practice of biodiversity studies in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The original purpose of the Nature Reserve was the protection and study of the common eider, Somateria mollissima, to protect its nesting places and to regulate the exploitation of its valuable down (Dubrovskii 1936). Plant research and protection was developed at a later stage, although some examination of the vegetation cover was included already in the background work by A.N. Dubrovsky (Dubrovskii 1936), who explored the territory and drafted the prospect of the future Nature Reserve in an expedition directed by the Leningrad Forestry Research Institute. Although the expedition intended to preserve botanical collections (Dubrovskii 1934), no herbarium specimens seem to have survived from those times. The pilot studies of plant communities in the Nature Reserve by T.P. Nekrasova in June of 1941 were interrupted by the war and brought no botanical collections either (Breslina 1968, Bianki 1998).

The first botanical collection for the Nature Reserve was made during the dissertation study by N.S. Parfentieva, who started mass gathering of dried plants during her employment in 1949–1950 and continued sporadically in 1958 and 1959 (Vorobieva 1987). Her work covered the territories along the Barents Sea coast and yielded a collection of over 1,500 specimens (Karpovich 1967). This work was also interrupted and remained unfinished; the collections were divided and deposited at KAND, MW (specimens from 1958) and KPABG.

In 1957 and 1959, a similar study was performed on the islands along the southern coast of the White Sea by G.M. Sinkova (Breslina 1968, Vorobieva 1987), who was a PhD student based at KPABG. She collected ca. 2,500 specimens of vascular plants, which were largely deposited at LE and KPABG, of which only a very small amount (107 specimens) arrived to KAND. This study was also left unfinished.

Minor botanical collections were made by zoologists employed at the Nature Reserve. For example, T.V. Koshkina collected some specimens during 1952–1956, which were amongst the early collections from the White and Barents Seas (Vorobieva 1987).

An important source of collections was student summer camps organised by the Department of Vascular Plants of the Moscow State University since the 1960s. In those years, the student expeditions, led by V.N. Vekhov (assistant professor) and N.E. Bogdanova (technical assistant), explored the Kem-Ludy Archipelago in 1962 (Bogdanova and Vekhov 1969a) and the Velikii Island in 1963–1964 (Bogdanova and Vekhov 1969b). The resulting herbarium collections were deposited partly at KAND (775 specimens), but largely at MW, with duplicates distributed from MW on an exchange basis.

The greatest contribution to the collections and the study of vascular plants of the Nature Reserve was made by I.P. Breslina. She performed a study of the flora and vegetation of the Kandalaksha Skerries of the White Sea in 1963–1966 (Breslina 1968), those of the Sem Ostrovov Archipelago of the Barents Sea in 1964–1967 (Breslina 1967, Breslina 1969) and in the Ainov Islands of the Barents Sea in 1968 (Parfentieva and Breslina 1969). Breslina regularly collected hundreds of specimens per year, which were rapidly identified and retained the highest quality of preservation. Taxonomically most difficult parts of her collections were identified by recognised experts: T.V. Egorova and N.N. Tzvelev (LE), R.N. Schljakov and O.I. Kuzeneva (KPABG). Some parts of her collections were donated to LE and KPABG and, therefore, were included in taxonomic treatments published in the Flora of Murmansk Region (Gorodkov 1953, Poyarkova 1954, Poyarkova 1956, Poyarkova 1959, Poyarkova 1966), although the particular herbarium specimens kept at KAND had not been examined and used for this publication.

After Breslina had been fired from her position of scientist at the Nature Reserve at the end of the 1960s, she took the position of forest ranger for the Kem-Ludy Archipelago, but her collecting activity was interrupted. In 1976, Breslina accepted a scientific position at KPABG where she continued her botanical studies on the islands of the White Sea. In 1977–1978 and 1984–1987, Breslina extensively studied the islands in the Porya Bay (Breslina 1987), which were added to the Nature Reserve in 1977. Her herbarium specimens from the later period were deposited at KPABG.

Breslina’s successor, V.A. Tsarkova (Vorobieva 1987) was not active in botanical collections. During Tsarkova’s term, in 1971–1974, only some 20 specimens were added to the herbarium holdings.

The territory of the Nature Reserve was continuously expanding to include new patches of protected land. Floristic inventories were required to cover the newly-acquired territories. This work was performed by E.G. Vorobieva, who was employed as a botanist during 1975–1994. Between 1976 and 1989, she studied the flora of the Luvenga, Olenii (Vorobieva 1996b), Kibrinskii (Vorobieva 1986), Tarasikha (Vorobieva 1996a) and Vachev (Vorobieva 1989) archipelagos and updated the information collected by Breslina from the Severnyi Archipelago (Vorobieva 1986). Many students from Leningrad (T. Gorokhova, I. Turevskaya, L.A. Diulina, E.I. Nikitina, S.A. Novozhilova and N.G. Khrenova), Kazan (M.V. Bubnova and V.G. Lavrova), Gorkii (L. Kuznetsova) and Pskov (V. Stalnova) assisted in this work. Vorobieva and her students made extensive herbarium collections, which remained untreated for a long time.

In the same period of time, the Nature Reserve employed another botanist, A.B. Georgievskii, who mostly studied plant communities and vegetation. In 1977, he explored the Gavrilov Islands (Georgievskii 1981) with a team of students and assistants (L.S. Georgievskaya, L.V. Kuznetsova, V.Yu. Neshataev and E.G. Redneva). Similarly, during 1977–1982, he mapped the vegetation of the Kovda Peninsula and the Porya Bay (Vorobieva 1987). These studies were documented with very few herbarium specimens.

Between 1990 and the beginning of the 2000s, the Nature Reserve was in a period of scientific inactivity due to limited funding. During this period, only minor botanical collections originated from the vicinities of Dalnie Zelentsy and the Gavrilov Archipelago by T.D. Paneva, M.Yu. Kupryukhina, D.M. Gerasimov and A.D. Vital (Paneva et al. 2006).

There was a long-term exploration and monitoring of the flora and vegetation of the Kem-Ludy Islands made by pupils and teachers of the Moscow Grammar School 1543, as well as students of the Moscow State University, which took place during 2001–2017 (Shipunov and Abramova 2006). Since 2002, student summer camps were organised by the Department of Vascular Plants of the Moscow State University by D.D. Sokolov. The resulting collections were deposited at MW with only a few specimens at KAND.

In the 2000s, N.G. Panarina (Khrenova) continued her studies on the flora of the islands of the Kandalaksha Bay, which were started in the 1980s and culminated with her PhD degree (Panarina and Papchenkov 2005). A number of school pupils from Umba Village (M.N. Kozhin, N.V. Nesterova, T.A. Balaganova, E.A. Osipova and Yu.G. Khrenova) participated in this work. The herbarium material, documenting these studies, was largely deposited at IBIW and only ca. 100 specimens remained at KAND.

In the 2000s, new botanists were employed at the Nature Reserve. During 2002–2004, V.N. Zherikhina (Plyusnina) studied the islands of the Severnyi Archipelago (Zherikhina and Moskvicheva 2006), the Kovda Peninsula and Velikii Island and collected ca. 150 specimens. During 2005–2008, E.N. Sidneva (Svyatova), assisted by E.A. Zakharova, studied seashore meadows of Velikii Island and the Kovda Peninsula and the flora of the smaller islands of the Babie More Bay. They collected a few hundred herbarium specimens, but only 89 specimens were accessioned at KAND.

Since 2008, M.N. Kozhin took the position of botanist at the Nature Reserve and the collection work has been considerably intensified. He studied the flora and vegetation in all parts of the White Sea area in the Nature Reserve. During these works, in 2006 and 2008, he focused on the flora of the Turii Mys with the assistance of students of the Faculty of Geography of the Moscow State University (T.S. Grevizirskaya and N.A. Zhorov). Targeted collections of sedges (Carex sp.) were made in 2007 in the Kandalaksha Bay. The most active floristic exploration took place in the Porya Bay during 2009–2014 (Kozhin 2011, Kozhin 2014, Kozhin 2016), with participation of students from the Faculty of Biololgy of the Department of Plant Ecology (T.V. Krutenko and K.B. Popova), the Department of Higher Plants (N.A. Vislobokov) and the Faculty of Geography of the Department of Biogeography (S.V. Dudov, A.P. Ivanov and T.S. Grevizirskaya) of the Moscow State University, Faculty of Psychology of the Saint-Petersburg State University (N.V. Nesterova), and a schoolteacher of biology from Kandalaksha (T.S. Vorobieva).

At the same period, in 2011–2013, E.O. Golovina (Komarov Botanical Institute) studied plant communities on the islands of the Porya Bay and the Srednie Ludy Islands. In 2017, M.N. Kozhin organised an expedition to the islands of the Olenii, Severnyi and Kibrinskii archipelagos and to Molochnitsa Island near the Kovda Peninsula, with participation of E.O. Golovina, S.A. Kutenkov (Institute of Biology, Petrozavodsk) and D.A. Zakharchenko (student of the Department of Plant Ecology, Moscow State University).

In the latest decade, students from the Moscow State University actively and regularly visited the Nature Reserve. In 2009 and 2010, E.A. Gryaznova collected nearly 150 specimens in the vicinity of Luvenga. Since 2012, a student summer camp has been organised by M.N. Kozhin in a few areas of the Kandalaksha Bay. Some students, supervised by Kozhin, based their work at the Nature Reserve: E.I. Vuzman worked on the islands of the Luvenga Archipelago in 2016–2019 (Vuzman and Kozhin 2019) and E.V. Kudr (with E.I. Medvedeva in 2017) studied the vegetation on the islands of the Porya Bay in 2017-2018 (Kudr and Kozhin 2019).

Altogether, ca. 4,000 herbarium specimens have been collected since 2008. These collections were deposited at KAND (ca. 1,500 specimens), MW, H and KPABG.

History of collection

The herbarium collection, as a separate scientific item, was established by N.S. Parfentieva in 1949 (Vorobieva 1987). It was not until the end of the 1950s when the collections have been organised and properly identified. In the 1960s, I.P. Breslina started scientific curation of the herbarium collections, which included vascular plants, lichens and mosses. Vascular plant collections were organised taxonomically, according to the Flora of Murmansk Region (Gorodkov 1953, Poyarkova 1954, Poyarkova 1956, Poyarkova 1959, Poyarkova 1966) and geographically as two subsets, the White Sea and the Barents Sea. In those times (Breslina 1967, Breslina 1968), the collections included 1459 specimens originating from the White Sea (with 644 specimens from the Severnyi Archipelago) and 975 specimens originating from the Barents Sea (with 859 specimens from the Sem Ostrovov Archipelago). The total number of specimens reached 2434 by the end of the 1960s.

During the next decades, despite the high intensity of inventories in the Nature Reserve, the accessions did not grow actively, because the new collections were largely left unorganised. By 1983, the number of specimens included in the collections was 2651 only (Karpovich 1988), which included 1543 specimens from the White Sea and 1108 specimens from the Barents Sea. In the 1990s, the collections were not curated at all and the later inventory (Moskvicheva 2004) counted the same 2651 specimens.

During the 2000s, herbarium curation in the Nature Reserve was resumed due to the active supervision of A.S. Koryakin, vice-director of the Reserve (Goryashko 2014). V.N. Zherikhina and E.N. Sidneva accessioned their own specimens. Since 2006, M.N. Kozhin took the job to identify and organise the collections. At that time, the subdivision of the Herbarium into two subsets was abandoned, but the collections were re-arranged according to the more detailed subdivision of the territory within each species. Now, the collection is organised according to the system of families and genera adopted in Dalla Torre and Harms (Dalla Torre and Harms 1900, Dalla Torre and Harms 1901, Dalla Torre and Harms 1903, Dalla Torre and Harms 1904, Dalla Torre and Harms 1905, Dalla Torre and Harms 1906, Dalla Torre and Harms 1907); species within genera are arranged alphabetically. New additions to the collection were annually accessioned on a regular basis. At present, the herbarium collection of the Nature Reserve numbers 10,218 specimens, which is a four-fold increase compared to the first inventory (Fig. 1). Nevertheless, in the latest years, the accessioning became irregular again, due to the lack of human resources for technical curation of the collections.

Figure 1.  

The number of herbarium specimens of vascular plants in the Kandalaksha Strict Nature Reserve according to the annual accessions.

Databasing of the herbarium collection

The first attempt to make a catalogue of herbarium collections in the Nature Reserve dates back to the 1960s. The information was recorded on paper cards, including species name, locality, habitat, collection date and number of duplicates. This work embraced the specimens collected from Velikii Island and the Severnyi Archipelago, but other parts of the collection were left unfinished. Besides, there were attempts to catalogue specimens collected by certain expeditions: 116 herbarium specimens collected by N.V. Koshkina in Ponoi were catalogued but not preserved, perhaps because of being extraterritorial and thus irrelevant to the Nature Reserve.

A new, complete catalogue on paper cards was compiled by E.G. Vorobieva in 1975–1976, which included species names and localities. This catalogue has never been updated.

Since the mid-1990s, the Nature Reserve prioritised electronic databasing of all the vast information accumulated in the Nature Reserve. The databasing of the herbarium of vascular plants has been in effect since 2007, when M.N. Kozhin started to record the information from the publicly-accessible collection and to organise its previously unaccessioned and newly arrived parts (Fig. 2). At present, all historical specimens are completely organised and included in the main collection.

Figure 2.  

Progress in databasing of the herbarium of vascular plants of the Kandalaksha Strict Nature Reserve.

The dynamics of collecting activities in the Nature Reserve has been highly uneven (Fig. 8). During the 1940s and 1950s, herbarium specimens were collected in a few years only, largely because of logistic problems (Goryashko 2020) and the temporary employments of botanists. The most fruitful period of collecting activity occurred in the 1960s and was linked with the work of Breslina and the expedition of the Moscow State University led by V.N. Vekhov. The following period of depression from the end of the 1960s to 1975 was linked with acute conflicts amongst the scientific personnel. During 1975–1983, the collections annually increased due to the work of E.G. Vorobieva, A.B. Georgievskii and visiting students. Another period of depression (1984–2003) can be explained by political and financial difficulties in the country. During that period, small collections were donated mostly by visiting scientists. Since 2004, the herbarium had been actively increasing with works of V.N. Zherikhina, E.N. Sidneva and M.N. Kozhin. Since 2015, the collecting activities have been casual, with a single significant expedition in 2017.

Figure 8.  

Annual increase in herbarium accessions of the Kandalaksha Strict Nature Reserve.