Динамика активности синтаксономических центров России и процессы их интеграции

Abstract

The history of «rooting» and current state of the Braun-Blanquet approach in Russia are discussed. The process began only in the 1960s, when a more favorable climate has developed in Soviet science, and researches showed interest in the following international principles of vegetation classification. However, at that time they used, as a rule, palliative options in which «Russian» criteria (dominants) were combined with «floristic» ones. As a rule, such schemes were not successful and gave rise to imbalances in syntaxonomy. After the year 1981, when the VI All-Union conference on the classification of vegetation was held in Ufa, Soviet geobotany moved to a «strict version» of the Braun-Blanquet approach. However, at that period there were no journals in the USSR that were ready to published papers with phytosociological tables. For this reason, phytocenologists have used the resources of All-Union Institute of scientific and technical information (VINITI), which provided a free-accepted manuscript deposit, published abstracts of these papers in Refereed journal and for a modest fee sent copies to all interested specialists. The data of the deposited papers became a base for the first variant of the Prodromus of vegetation of Russia, which included 72 classes, 148 orders, 309 alliances and 74 suballiances. Since the year 2001, when the journal «Vegetation of Russia» was organized in Saint-Petersburg, both the high professional level of editorial board and the competent reviewers provide the publication of papers in strict accordance with the Braun-Blanquet approach (including the «International code of phytosociological nomenclature»), that greatly stimulated the development of syntaxonomy in Russia. Five syntaxonomic centers (Far East-Siberia, Ufa, Saint-Petersburg, Togliatti, Bryansk) have been formed. The information of their publication activity (see Table) for the periods 2001–2005, 2006–2011 and 2012–2016 years in all centres (in particular in the Far East-Siberia and Ufa) shows the number of publications is constantly increasing. This gives the hope that in the foreseeable future the Russian syntaxonomists will be able to materialize the multi-volume edition «The Vegetation of Russia».