Turchaninov, Nikolai Stepanovich

Turchaninov, Nikolai Stepanovich 

Born 1796 in the village of Nikitovka, in present-day Belgorod Oblast; died Dec. 26, 1863 (Jan. 7,1864), in Kharkov. Russian botanist.

Turchaninov graduated from the University of Kharkov in 1814. He served as an official in various departments in St. Petersburg (from 1814), Irkutsk (from 1828), and Krasnoiarsk (from 1837). After his retirement in 1845, he lived in Taganrog and Kharkov (from 1847). Turchaninov assembled a collection of plants from St. Petersburg Province, Eastern Siberia, and Mongolia. His Baikal-Daur Flora (1842–57) was awarded the Demi-dov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg in 1857. Turchaninov described more than 100 new genera and more than 1,000 new species of plants from Russia, China, Mongolia, Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, South America, Mexico, and other regions of the world. His herbarium, containing about 50,000 species, is housed at the Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in Kiev.

REFERENCE

Lipshits, S. Iu. “Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo zamechatel’nogo russkogo botanika-sistematika N. S. Turchaninova (1796–1863).” Botanicheskii zhurnal, 1964, vol. 49, no. 5. (References.)