Protected species of vascular plants in Khibiny Montains: How many representative herbar collections?

The Khibiny Mountains are a territory with a high botanic diversity and include value habitat types. We analyzed the representativeness of the herbaria of the Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden-Institute (KPABG) and the Institute of Industrial ecology Problems of the North (INEP) in relation to protected species of vascular plants in the Khibiny. The collections include 34 of 49 protected species recorded in literature. In the course of the analysis, the complete information from the herbarium labels was converted into electronic format and prepared to include into the database of the “Flora of Russian Lapland”. In the absence of precise geographic coordinates on the labels, geo-referencing was performed according to a standardized protocol using topographic maps of the Khibiny Mts at a scale of 1:100,000, archival materials (field diaries and reports) and high-resolution satellite images of the earth’s surface. Most of the regionally protected species in herbaria were collected in the most accessible southern part of the Khibiny, near by the human transformed territories and along a dirt road through the mountain pass. regional botanical Natural Monuments and federal Protected Area Polar-Alpine Botanical Garden-Institute are among the best studied. The herbaria include specimens collected over almost hundred-of-years periods and almost no specimens of protected species from the “Khibiny” National Park.