Distribution of vascular plants north of Lake Baikal: a new, open access dataset

The area north of Lake Baikal has been poorly studied. Moreover, most of the studies conducted in this region were focused on mountain ridges or river valleys. This region includes a part of Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM), a broad-gauge railway in the centre of Siberia, Russia. The railway is an alternative route of the Trans-Siberian Railway; BAM starts in southern Siberia (Taishet station of Irktusk Oblast), passes through the northern part of Lake Baikal and finishes in the Russian Far East (Sovetskaya Gavan station of Khabarovsky Krai). BAM has four connections with the Trans-Siberian Railway and is the centre of economic development for many regions of Russia. Maya Ivanova and Alexandr Chepurnov summarised the existing floristic information for this region in detailed species distribution maps which they published in the book "Flora of the western part of developing regions of Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM)" (1983). After publishing this book, very few floristic studies have been performed in the study region. All available botanical information is still accumulated in a number of printed papers or books with limited circulation, which are not widely known to the international scientific community.

We have digitised the point distribution maps from the book of Ivanova and Chepurnov and georeferenced all occurrence and sampling localities. The resulting dataset includes 9972 occurrences for 770 vascular plant species and subspecies from the area north of Lake Baikal. Additionally, the dataset includes information on the distribution of 43 rare and endangered species with 366 occurrences. From our point of view, the dataset makes a contribution to the global biodiversity data mobilisation, providing plant species distribution data for such a remote mountainous area.