Virtual Herbarium ALTB: collection of vascular plants of the Altai Mountain Country

The herbarium of the South-Siberian Botanical Garden of Altai State University (ALTB) is the largest collection of plants from transboundary territory of the Altai Mountain Country (AMC) including Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China. The herbarium contains more than 450,000 specimens (ranks seventh in the country in terms of herbarium specimen’s number and fourth among universities collections). Altai State University(ASU) being one of the most important center of academic education and research, and socio-cultural complex in Siberia and the Far East serves to provide a distinguished learning environment for undergraduate and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields meeting the needs of modern knowledge-based post-industrial society, and contributing to the development of the region. It actively promotes international cooperation and strategic collaboration with neighboring countries of Asia (Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, etc.) in the field of science, education, and culture. In particular, the goals of the South-Siberian Botanical Garden include: preparation and publication of a multi-volume work "Flora Altaica", research of flora and vegetation of the AMC, monographic study of individual plant groups,conducting laboratory classes,summer practices, special courses, development of measures to protect rare and endangered plant species.Virtual Herbarium ALTB (altb.asu.ru, GBIF) is the largest digital collection of plants from transboundary territory of the Altai Mountain Country and the main empirical material of the project "Flora Altaica" (http://altaiflora.asu.ru/en/). The dataset contains 22,466 digital specimens of vascular plants (67% of them has exact location, accessed on 30.03.2021). The most part of herbarium material was collected in the period from 1977 to nowadays (the most intensive was from 1995 to 2008). In 2019, the table of accumulated label data of Herbarium ALTB was adapted to the Darwin Core specification (http://altb.asu.ru/). The problem of storage and exchange of data on phytodiversity of Altai Krai and adjacent territory in multilingual environment of the AMC was technically solved with the help of this universal specification.