Russia ranks 25^th in the world in terms of the number of GBIF-mediated records (17,895,437 occurrences as of October 15, 2025). The country lacks a national system on open biodiversity data, so the data published in GBIF forms the basis for monitoring and conservation efforts. Currently, 134 publishers from Russia have published 822 datasets in GBIF. Lomonosov Moscow State University leads this effort with 124 datasets, 4.2M occurrences, and 2,407 citations. The leading datasets from MSU are: RU-BIRDS.RU (1.6M occurrences), Moscow University Herbarium (1.1M), Local floras of Russia (0.7M), etc. However, Russia ranks 15^th in the world in terms of vascular plant GBIF-mediated records (8,313,423 as of October 15, 2025). This is the result of extensive work being carried out at the Moscow University Herbarium to document the flora of Russia and publish data in the public domain. We granted a data publishing program for ten other herbaria to join the Moscow Digital Herbarium platform (https://plant.depo.msu.ru/). The enormous role of citizen science lies in the exceptionally fruitful accumulation of data on the iNaturalist platform. For instance, the Moscow State University project on the flora of Russia currently contains 4,885,333 verified observations (https://flora.depo.msu.ru/) from 34,113 users. “Atlas of the Russian Flora” is a new initiative for producing grid maps of native and alien vascular plants of the country. This initiative is integrated into the Moscow Digital Herbarium and employs different data sources merged into a single FLORUS dataset. Ca. 6.5M+ records (700K grid records) were used to produce 9,885 grid maps with 100×100 km squares. This dataset includes precleaned GBIF-mediated records and other sources. The taxonomy is given against the “Catalogue of Life” associated with the accepted names in the Moscow Digital Herbarium. The work was supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 21-77- 20042, https://rscf.ru/en/project/21-77-20042/).

Digitisation,biodiversity,Russia,Nature conservation