Siberian Botanical Gardens

(full name, Central Siberian Botanical Gardens), a scientific research institution organized in 1946 on the outskirts of the city of Novosibirsk as part of the Western Siberian branch of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Since 1958 the gardens have been administered by the Siberian division of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and since 1961 they have had the status of a research institute. The gardens occupy a total area of 1,060 hectares (1974), including 250 hectares devoted to exposition facilities and 245 hectares devoted to nurseries and experimental plots.

The plant collection of the Siberian Botanical Gardens comprises more than 7,000 species, forms, and varieties of wild and cultivated plants. There are plant specimens from Siberia, the Far East, and other regions of the USSR, as well as from foreign countries. The collection includes feed, industrial, medicinal, vegetable, fruit, berry, and ornamental plants. The gardens have laboratories of flora and plant resources, ornamental horticulture, dendrology, introduction and acclimatization of cultivated plants, geobotany, plant biochemistry, microbiology and plant physiology, biology of irrigated crops, lower plants, and recreation forests and forest parks. There also is a forest-protection experimental station and an herbarium. Research is conducted on the introduction and acclimatization of plants and on the biological bases for the rational use and protection of the plant world of the USSR. The following botanicogeo-graphic plots are being established: Siberian steppes, pine-birch forests of the forest steppe, and cedar, spruce, and fir forests of the taiga.