Vascular plants of pine forests from the upper Ob region (South Siberia)

Study Extent

The research focused on pine forests in drained positions. In the frame of vegetation classification (Braun-Blanquet approach), these communities belong to Brachypodio pinnati–Betuletea pendulae Ermakov, Korolyuk et Lashchinsky 1991 class.

Sampling

Each relevés was made on an area of 20 x 20 m. Geobotanical materials were stored in the IBIS (Zverev, 2007); the data were converted in the Excell table and revised.

Quality Control

The data were collected by researchers from the Central Siberian Botanical Garden of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Method steps

1. The presented data were collected during a geobotanical survey of the territory. 224 geobotanical relevés were taken in pine forests of the region. The resulting dataset consists of 8954 occurrence records. The names and contents of the fields were aligned with Darwin Core (Wieczorek et al. 2012) and include the following: “occurrenceID”, “taxonID”, “acceptedNameUsage”, “scientificName”, “taxonRank”, “kingdom”, “phylum”, “family”, “genus”, “genericName”, “acceptedNameUsage”, “country”, “countryCode”, “stateProvince”, “county”, “verbatimLocality”, “habitat”, “verbatimElevation”, “decimalLatitude”, “decimalLongitude”, “coordinateUncertaintyInMeters”, “day”, “month”, “year”, “recordedBy”, “basisOfRecord”.

The Upper Ob region includes territories in the southeast of western Siberia. These are the plains contouring the northwest face of Altai-Sayan Mountain Country and adjacent to the Ob River. The altitudes of the territory vary in 100-300 m. The surface is dissected by erosion gullies and ravine systems. Vicinity to windward macroslopes of Altai-Sayan Country has a strong influence on the climate of the territory which is expressed primarily in increasing precipitation. Despite a rather southern position, the region is referred to the forest-steppe zone. In zoning schemes, bioclimatic boundaries here are turned in a submeridian direction. Zonal vegetation occupies non-sandy sites and is presented by a combination of small massifs of Betula-forests and different meadow and steppe communities (Lapshina, 1963; Makunina et al., 2010; Latchinsky & Latchinskaya, 2012). Sandy substrates prevail in this area. They form Ob terraces and pave bottoms of ancient ravines of water runoff. On such sort of habitats forests from Pinus sylvestris prevail. The biggest Pinus-forests on the right Ob River bank are Verhneob (up to 90x50 km) and Suzun (up to 70x50 km) massifs of forests; on the left bank – Barnaul and Kasmala ribbon forests, their length is 250 km, width – to 3-6 km. In depressions surrounded by Pinus sylvestris- forests, small bog massifs occur. The research focused on pine forests in drained positions.