Scientific publications

First reports on fungi in Karelia were published by Finnish and Swedish researchers in the second half of the 19th century, and then, in the 1920s data were gathered by the Olonets Expedition and surveys by Finnish scientist M. Laurila in the 1930s provided data from the north of the present-day Republic of Karelia. Systematic studies of the fungal biota of Karelia, however, began only after Maria V. Freundling started working at the Karelian (Complex) Research Institute (KRI) in 1931 and produced her first fungal collections in 1933. M. V. Freudling worked at KRI from 1931 to 1936, and then also at the Karelian-Finnish Research Facility (later named Karelian-Finnish Branch, KFB) of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1946 to 1953. She collected specimens from the Kivach State Nature Reserve, which was then a unit of KRI, later KFB. The Herbarium of the Karelian Research Centre RAS currently stores some 500 herbarium specimens collected by Freundling from the Kivach reserve, of which 137 are supplied with the collector’s paintings. Some 40 specimens were mounted on herbarium sheets and illustrated by the author’s watercolor paintings. This article provides a list of 222 species of sac and basidial fungi based on the specimens collected by M. V. Freudling in different years. The fungal herbarium is now a component part of the Herbarium of the Karelian Research Centre RAS (PTZ).