From the seventh On the ground floor of Kherson State University, Oleksandr Khodosovtsev and Ivan Moisienko had a clear view of the enemy. It was a cool December morning, and Russian troops who had occupied the Ukrainian city of Kherson since the early days of Moscow’s full-scale invasion had recently retreated east across the Dnipro River. . Mushroom clouds hovered on the horizon as they peered through the slamming floor-to-ceiling windows of the botany department. The explosions, they believed, probably came from tanks less than 5 kilometers from where they were.
That morning, the two botany professors had arrived by train from kyiv and crossed the partially ruined streets of Kherson to reach the university. The city was still being bombed and to reach their laboratory one had to climb a spiral staircase lined with stained glass windows overlooking the Dnieper River, towards the enemy.
Their mission was to save a piece of history: the Kherson Herbarium, an irreplaceable collection of more than 32,000 plants, lichens, mosses and fungi, accumulated over more than a century by generations of scientists, some during journeys of several thousand kilometers through remote regions. of Ukraine. “It’s a kind of work of art,” says Moisienko, 52. “It’s priceless.”
Herbaria like the one in Kherson, a port city in southern Ukraine, are about more than taxonomy. They play a vital role in the study of species extinction, invasive pests and climate change. Although it is by no means the largest in the world (the National Museum of Natural History in Paris has 9,500,000 specimens), the Kherson herbarium is, according to Moisienko, valuable because of its unique contribution to this domain. Rare species found only in Ukraine, some of which are in danger of extinction, are documented on its shelves.
When Russian tanks entered Ukraine on February 24, 2022, they threatened not only the thousands of dried, pressed, and preserved specimens stored at the university, but also the lands where these samples had been collected. In the more than 17 months since Vladimir Putin declared his “special military operation” in Ukraine, millions of acres of land – about 30 percent of the country’s protected areas – have been mutilated by indiscriminate bombing, burning and maneuvering. military. Russian troops have destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of forests and put more than 800 plants at risk of extinction, including 20 rare species that have mostly disappeared elsewhere, according to the nonprofit Ukraine Nature Conservation Group (UNCG).
The Ukrainian government estimates that a third of the country’s territory has been contaminated by mines or other unexploded ordnance. Large swathes of the countryside could remain inaccessible for decades. That means it may be a long time before scientists like Khodosovtsev and Moisienko can return to collect samples.
