Latest version published by Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University on May 8, 2026 Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University

TUL Herbarium presents collections from Tula Oblast stored at the Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University, Russia, which is an educational and scientific institution that supports various types of scientific activities, including research on biodiversity and nature conservation. The university is a holder of some biological collections, such as herbarium of vascular plants, mosses and fungi collected mainly throughout Tula Oblast and from adjacent regions.

The collections of vascular plants (10,098 specimens) were imaged during period December 2019 — January 2023 under the joint grant 19-44-710002 r_a "Assessment of the diversity and visualization of the flora of the Tula region using modern information technologies" (supervisor T.Yu. Svetasheva, TulSPU). Databasing and georeferencing of the specimens from the TUL Herbarium was performed by the staff members of the Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University and Tula Local History Museum. Digital collections of the TUL Herbarium are fully available in the Moscow Digital Herbarium (https://tula.depo.msu.ru//) and GBIF (https://doi.org/10.15468/ca08cm).

TUL is an acronym of the Herbarium of the Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University (TSPU), Russia, which is the main custodian of the herbarium collections from Tula Oblast and one of the oldest in Tula institutions with the natural history collections. The acronym was assigned to the Herbarium in 2019 (New York Botanical Garden 2019).

Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University was founded on 19 September 1938 as a federal institution of higher education with the name Tula State Pedagogical Institute. On 18 July 1958, it was named after Lev Tolstoy. On 24 December 1994, it was awarded the status of State Pedagogical University.

The collecting of plant specimens began in the 1960s, when the Faculty of Chemistry and Biology was launched at the Tula State Pedagogical Institute (TSPI). The first collections were made by the students during their summer field practices, as well as from individual assignments on the Botany course. The first herbarium specimens have non-standard appearance and size, since the paper for the specimens was chosen by students at random and it was often cut out manually and then covered with tracing paper attached on the left edge to preserve dry plants. There are ca. 100 those non-standard sheets from the 1960s.

In the 1970s, institute students were the main contributors to the herbarium collections. The specimens acquired a bit more standardised appearance and constant size of sheets 25 x 34 cm, but still differed from the 28 x 42 cm size accepted in the major Russian herbaria. The majority of specimens were supplied with a standard pre-printed label, which included the heading of Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical Institute in Russian (Fig. 1). With 344 specimens, the total number of collections of 1970s has increased in comparison with the 1960s by about 3.5 times. It is noteworthy that, amongst these old sheets, there are specimens collected by students who later became teachers at the Tula State Pedagogical University and some of them are still working there.

The second half of 1980s became a period of important changes in the scientific life of TSPI. By 1986, the herbarium collection of the Botany Department consisted of several hundred sheets and continued to grow quickly. There was no special hall or even a special cupboard for herbarium storage, so huge piles of specimens were kept just in the labs and staff workrooms.

In 1987, the Botany Department was headed by Professor Lyudmila Fedorovna Tararina (Fig. 2). She initiated the organisation of the scientific herbarium, convinced the administration to provide a room for herbarium storage and equipped it with several custom-made cupboards (Sheremetyeva 2005). In addition, she brought a remarkable feature to the general outlook of our herbarium sheets by ordering a supply of pink paper (30 x 45 cm) for mounting the specimens (Fig. 3).

The first curator of the Herbarium in 1987 was Irina Sergeevna Sheremetyeva (Fig. 4), who just at that time started to teach Botany in TSPU and work under her PhD thesis "Flora of Tula Oblast" (Sheremetyeva 1999). The formal foundation of the herbarium gave a powerful impulse to active botanical research. In 1987, 1,368 specimens were collected in a single year, a threefold increase compared to all previous collections. This number includes scientific collections from various districts of Tula Oblast, as well as student's collections made for the scientific herbarium.

In 1988, a large plant collection of Alexey Ivanovich Alyushin (1897–1987) consisting of 2,104 specimens was gifted by his relatives to the Herbarium. Alyushin was a school teacher and skilled naturalist, who especially loved Botany. In 1941–1945, he also worked at the Tula Local History Museum (Lakomov and Svetasheva 2005) (Fig. 5). He intensively investigated the flora of Tula Oblast and made an outstanding collection of vascular plants. His collections are shared by three Herbaria at present – TUL (2,104 specimens), Tula Local History Museum (ca. 1,000) and MW (297). Alyushin published two popular books about plants of Tula Oblast (Alyushin 1975, Alyushin 1982).

Within Alyushin's collections stored in the TUL Herbarium, there are four specimens of Konstantin Semenovich Dubensky. Dubensky was a teacher of Natural Science at the Tula Real School and Women's Gymnasium in the 1900s–1920s (Fig. 6). He conducted biological excursions in nature and collected plants. His major collections are preserved in the Tula Local History Museum.

Probably, at the same time, the Herbarium received 13 specimens of plants collected by the botanist V.A. Arsenyev in 1931. Unfortunately, the exact information about their origin is unknown.

The period 1987–1999 became the most productive time for the accumulation of plant specimens in the TUL Herbarium (ca. 5,000 specimens). Several scientific research activities, based on intensive collection expeditions across Tula Oblast, were completed at that time, like "Flora of Tula Oblast" (Sheremetyeva 1999), "Adventive flora of Tula Oblast" (Khoroon 1999) and "Register of vegetation cover of Tula Oblast" (unpublished scientific report by L.F. Tararina and I.S. Sheremetyeva). A.V. Shcherbakov from Lomonosov Moscow State University made a large collection of aquatic plants (322 specimens) in line with the preparation of the "Atlas of flora of the Tula Oblast water reservoirs" (Shcherbakov 1999) and habilitation thesis "Hydrophilic flora of vascular plants as a model object for inventory and analysis of flora: the example of the Tula and neighboring regions" (Shcherbakov 2011). Large collections on the flora of Yasnaya Polyana Museum-Estate were made by E.G. Balashova, T.Yu. Svetasheva and I.L. Dorokhina for their master's theses (782 specimens).

In the 2000s, the Herbarium was supplemented with ca. 660 specimens mainly due to a series of works devoted to the study of protected areas of Tula Oblast (1999–2005, under L.F. Tararina) and the preparation of the "Red Data Book: Specially Protected Natural Areas of Tula Oblast" (Tararina et al. 2007) and "Red Data Book of Tula Oblast: Plants and Fungi" (Shcherbakov 2010). Therefore, a significant part of those collections includes specimens of rare and threatened plants. The standard regional checklist, entitled "Synopsis of the flora of vascular plants of Tula Oblast", was published upon thorough study of available collections and vast literature (Sheremetyeva et al. 2008).

After 2010, the Herbarium continued to be filled mainly by the collections of students, but their collections were transferred to the educational collection, which is used during lab classes and is not part of the Herbarium. However, in 2018–2019, the TUL Herbarium was replenished with recently-collected specimens due to the preparation of the second edition of the regional "Red Data Book" and monitoring of the protected natural areas (Sheremetyeva and Svetasheva 2019, Svetasheva and Sheremetyeva 2019, Svetasheva et al. 2019). It should be noted that, since the 2000s, the Tula scientists began to form collections of the other groups, for example, fungi, lichens and mosses. Gradually, by 2019, the TUL Herbarium represents a significant base of the Tula Oblast biodiversity, including ca. 10,000 specimens of vascular plants, ca. 1,000 specimens of bryophytes and ca. 2,000 specimens of fungi and lichens.

Today, the Herbarium occupies one room (ca. 25 m2) in the building of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Tula State Lev Tolstoy Pedagogical University located on 125, Lenina Prospect, in Tula. There is no special regular staff in the TUL Herbarium.

At the end of 2018, Lomonosov Moscow State University, which also houses some plant collections from Tula Oblast, suggested to combine efforts to digitise the entire collection of the Tula flora and place the obtained data on the Internet using a platform of the Moscow Digital Herbarium. The created project "Diversity assessment and visualisation of the Tula Oblast flora using modern data technologies" has been supported by RFBR and Tula Oblast Goverment and this has brought the Herbarium to a higher level. In 2019, the acronym TUL was assigned to the Herbarium of Tula State Lev Tolstoy University after its registration in Index Herbariorum. By the end of the project in 2023, TUL Herbarium collections of vascular plants were fully digitised, georeferenced and published in the Moscow Digital Herbarium and GBIF.

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