In the Digital Herbarium of MSU the system of an automatic geobinding earned

Herbarium of the Moscow university (MW) — a collection of world value, the first mentioning of which belongs to 1780. The volume of funds exceeds 1 million samples. Here are concentrated as the most valuable historical relics connected with Karl Linney and James Cook's names and extensive materials of the subsequent researchers of flora. The herbarium constantly is replenished with the new digitized samples. For the last five years 60 species of flowering plants were opened by the staff of MSU, and only eight of them were found in Russia. Only in 2016 16 new plant species were found. The sample of each plant gerbarizirutsya and provided for a collection in scientific institution with which the scientist cooperates. After that the image of each open plant gets also to a digital herbarium. It is also possible to receive for studying material from foreign herbariums.

2017: System of an automatic geobinding

A system will allow to tie in the shortest possible time hundreds of thousands of digitized gerbarny samples from a collection of the Digital herbarium of MSU to exact geographical coordinates. Development is created with assistance of the Russian Scientific Fund (RSF) within the Noah's Ark project.

Now the ISTRA system works on two algorithms: by coincidence of the text description of the place of collecting in the label of a sample with the place name and on compliance of date of collecting of a sample with a name of the collector which collected a plant. In the first case, having supplied with coordinates one of the samples collected, for example, at the Arbour of Winds on the Gurzuf yayla in the Crimea scientists receive exact geobindings for all plants which got to a herbarium in this place. In the second case, result less exact – the algorithm ties all plants collected by the researcher on the same day to one point.

2016

Digital herbarium of the Moscow university

In December, 2016 ELAR corporation completed the second stage of digitization of the Herbarium of D.P. Syreyshchikov of biological ^[1]: more than 230 thousand gerbarny sheets are scanned.

"Taking into account the created ELAR last year of 502 thousand high-quality electronic copies of gerbarny samples, by this moment 77% of the Herbarium of D.P. Syreyshchikov are digitized, - the leading researcher of department of geobotany, the Dr.Sci.Biol. Alexey Seryogin told. – Now our digital herbarium takes the sixth place in the world by quantity of the provided samples. And when we completely will fill the database of Depositary of biomaterial of the bioresource center MSU with the created electronic collection, we will become the fourth in the world on online-access to biobank".

At the first stage of digitization of a herbarium, in 2015, specialists of ELAR fulfilled technology processes thanks to what it was succeeded to achieve as high-quality electronic images during the detailing of images, and security for gerbarny samples. These technologies were applied also at the second stage of digitization. In particular, for scanning the planetary scanner "ELAR Planskan" which is completely conforming to requirements of digitization of biological material was used. "When scanning graphic images were named by numbers of barcodes which were pasted on gerbarny sheets. We also made the facilitated user version in the JPEG format with the resolution of 300 DPI of an array of the processed images of a TIFF format", - the leading expert of ELAR corporation on work with libraries and universities Grigory Yevstigneyev told.

Thanks to the project of digitization of the Herbarium of D.P. Syreyshchikov scientists and students had an opportunity to study samples in the remote mode in detail.

The digital herbarium of the Moscow university contains 786 thousand samples. Images are already available for all comers on the portal of Depositary of the live systems Lomonosov Moscow State University.

The digital herbarium of Lomonosov Moscow State University wins first place in the world on number of the scanned samples among university collections and the sixth place "in the overall ranking", conceding only to collections of the largest scientific centers of the world — Paris, Leiden, Beijing, New York and Washington.

Noah's Ark

Scientists of Lomonosov Moscow State University within the Noah's Ark project created a digital herbarium — a collection of the scanned images of gerbarny samples from funds of biological faculty.

"The Noah's Ark project is unique for Russia and for the whole world — the scientific project coordinator, the leading researcher of the Moscow university Pyotr Kamensky stated. — A main objective of the project — preserving, a research and useful use of biological diversity of our planet. Of course, to these purposes served and serve many other projects, however within Noah's Ark we work with all possible types of biological samples — from the dried insects to cages and the whole human organs. An important part of the project is made by creation of uniform biocollection information space. In other words, we develop a digital resource which will integrate in itself(himself) the greatest possible amount of information about biological collections. Meanwhile we work at the level of MSU, but in the future we are going to extend to the All-Russian level. The digital herbarium of the Moscow university is 'first signs' of our information system which clearly demonstrate all benefits of global approach to the analysis of a biodiversity.

"Works on digitization of a university herbarium began spring of 2015, and in one and a half years all numerous representatives of flora of Eastern Europe, Siberia and the Far East, the Crimea, the Caucasus, Mongolia, the countries of Africa and the Southern Asia were scanned — Alexey Seryogin, one of developers of a digital herbarium, the Dr.Sci.Biol., the leading researcher Gerbariya of Lomonosov Moscow State University, the head "Plants" of the Noah's Ark project told. — The created database is the information warehouse, largest in Russia, about a variety and distribution of plants. It is intended both for professionals, and for fans who want to learn more about a floor. To use a digital herbarium, it is enough to enter the Latin name of a plant or to use function of advanced search. All images are submitted in high resolution so that it was possible to study separate fragments of a sample needlessly separately to digitize the interesting part. Digitization was made by forces of scientific personnel of Lomonosov Moscow State University and partner company. We also actively attracted volunteers from among students of our university".